Bill Moyers Journal; 422; Inventing America: A Conversation with Garry Wills

BILL MOYERS' JOURNAL

Inventing America: A Conversation with Garry Wills

July 2, 1979

BILL MOYERS: This is one of the most famous paintings in American history. What does it say to you?

GARRY WILLS: Well, it represents the Committee of Five that drew up the draft of the Declaration, reporting to the President of Congress, Hancock, and Secretary; and the other people have not heard yet what's in the Declaration; Jefferson is about to explain it. They lean

here's Benjamin Harrison -- people are listening as in a conversation piece. But it's not like a conversation piece because it has this mystic light which comes from no known source, from up here. In "The Death of Chatham" by Copley there was a light through a high window in the House of Lords that came down. Here, the windows are all shuttered, the roof is up there; so it's a light that comes down and gives a glow behind the figures, an aureole, and lights up the trophies of battle that have been won by the battles won by General Washington. So the risk of these men coming in and presenting this document, a risk that has to be vindicated out on the field, draws together the whole philosophical, civil, military solemnity of this

occasion.

MOYERS: Was it really Jefferson's Declaration?

WILLS: Well, it was his primarily, of course; he was the principal author. It was not all of what he wanted, clearly he saved that for us to study at our leisure but surely, given the changes in our attitude toward its importance and everything else, it was exactly the kind of achievement which he put, with good reason, on his tombstone.

MOYERS: Would it be fair to say that this is the beginning of the invention of America?

WILLS: (Laughs.) Yes; yes.

Again, we have to realize that inventing means many things to us and to them, some shared, some not. But yes, in a way they were stumbling on America then, they were inventing it as someone invented an island in the eighteenth century, discovered an is land. They were discovering that in each other which would grow into what we are.

MOYERS: In this hour, Garry Wills talks about inventing America. I'm Bill Moyers.

MOYERS: Like most of us, Garry Wills is many things to many people. He is even many things to himself, and for most of his adult life he has conducted a soliloquy in letters that has become the public record of a private journey, an intellectual journey that has carried Garry Wills from early stardom on William Buckley's National Review to stature now as an iconoclast capable of infuriating ideologues of any persuasion. Journalist, critic, scholar, teacher, columnist, author, he has covered a vast terrain since he graduated from St. Louis and Xavier Universities, earned his doctorate at Yale, and set forth into the world of letters and ideas.

Over the years, while teaching classics at Johns Hopkins University, he has written widely on subjects as disparate as Catholic theology and Richard Nixon. Whatever his subject, Garry Wills is a first-rate thinker who can rattle your complacency as if it were a loose shutter in a high wind.

He is so prolific he was completing a new book, Confessions of a Conservative, even as I talked with him about his last. Inventing America, published last year, is Garry Wills' effort to recreate the intellectual world of Thomas Jefferson, to discover and examine in particular those ideas that shaped the mind of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence. It was an auspicious task, widely acclaimed upon completion, but controversial, too. For Garry Wills wanted to know not only what Thomas Jefferson had written but what he had meant in the idiom of his time. To talk about the mind of Jefferson, we met at Jefferson's home, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

When you come here, what impresses you most about this place?

WILLS: I suppose the control, the total management. He chose a mountain that's not the highest one around here but one that he could shave off, sculpt so that it would fall away at just the angle he wanted, so that he could hide the dependencies and the outworks that he wanted to hide; he would have a total view in every direction of all of the surrounding territory, he would build a house on that promontory that would look out at all these marvelous views, so that you see nature in still a rather virgin condition, but then especially so, subjected to one controlling mind.

MOYERS: So you can look at the house in the setting here and read something of Jefferson's mind.

WILLS: (Laughs.) Oh, a great deal. He chose a very odd spot, because it was sentimentally dear to him; because it was high, like the villas of Palladio in the land around Venice; because he loved space he thought that that was important for the exercise of freedom. He told travelers, whenever you go to a strange town, go up to the highest point, the first thing you do, and get the shape of the place. He had that architect's mind and that cartographer's mind -- his father was a surveyor that always wanted to see the logic of the situation, the large shape from as high up as you could get. A great love of height in him, even when purchased at very great cost, as here. It was an economically very strange place to put a plantation.

MOYERS:

Is that what you meant when you called Monticello an "economic blasphemy"?

WILLS: Yes; of course. Tidelands had four great rivers that had ocean vessels coming right up to your wharf and taking tobacco away. Jefferson's father had his plantation down at the foot of this mountain in Piedmont, and he had to put things on rafts and send them down the Rivanna River. Jefferson went even farther than that, he came way up on this mountain, where he had to tote things up, where water was scarce, where all of the conditions were exactly wrong for a Virginia plantation. But it meant so much to him as an artifact, as a place where he could put his stamp on the land that he loved, that he was willing to pay that cost.

MOYERS: What are some of the particular aspects of the house that intrigued you when you started coming here on your research?

WILLS: Well, the house is a marvel; it forced Jefferson to originality, although in theory he was against originality in architecture. thought that antiquity as interpreted by Palladio should be your guide

He and you should always have an authority. But unfortunately, he began the house before he went to Europe, and he had only guidebooks to go by; and so he spent a dozen years building a first house which eleven years later he came back and almost totally dismantled. the dome is, a great big library; and on the other side, which is the

The first house had, where front side, it had not only this Doric portico with a pediment but a higher Ionic portico with a pediment, and the wings were much closer in; so that it was a very high, white temple on the top of this mountain. Downstairs was the living room/dining room area, and upstairs was the shrine of learning, his high library. Well, he went to France and found out that the style there was for long, low buildings like the Hôtel de Salm. So he came back and he had this building, much of it put up, that he had to convert, and in order to do that he had to play a lot of tricks he had to do a lot of things that some purists find objectionable. a lot of dead space, there's a lot of fooling.

There's three-story building, but he makes it look like a one-story building. For instance, on this side it actually is two stories. But he does that by having actually three stories, and he lowers the windows so that they look like no windows on the second story, only skylights. On the other side there are part of the one-story windows although it's dead space, too,

He has that dome up there to lower line of the house, the anything, the dome room. He has those Chinese-type railings running along to set off that horizontal line with the entablature below them. And in order to make the house, which is very boxy in floor plan, look like a long, slim house, he steps it back, point after point after point after point, narrowing it out toward the end so that when you come at it from the side it looks like a narrow house, it looks like the narrow part of a telescope that's come out to you; and he puts a little pediment out on the narrowest end so that it doesn't show its form. intricate, intricate house, with lots of private areas and lots of intimacy, but almost all of them look out through this glass, through all these windows, and they're lit above by skylights, so that the play of light it's just pierced and penetrated all around by light.

MOYERS: Do you think he was trying more to make a statement?

WILLS: I don't think he was at the outset. Finished this house in 1809, he went off and built himself a perfectly classical octagon house after Inigo Jones down in Lynchburg. But I think

that in the process his own love of the mountain, his own love of the place, he gave such thought and care to every little detail of it that it did express his personality probably more than anything he made or wrote. I think this is the most complete statement of Jefferson's feel for himself and his place in America.

MOYERS: So to sum up, what does this place say about Jefferson's mind?

WILLS: Well, I think what you find is a person who wants to take every opportunity of the environment, of the place, of the training he's had, of the potentialities; he wants to look out to the west, to the Blue Ridge, he wants to look back to antiquity, to Palladio, to the Romans; he wants to make a kind of summa of his own achievements and what he thinks are the possibilities of America.

MOYERS: If, then, you want to get back to the world that Jefferson helped to make, it helps to come here.

WILLS: Oh, absolutely. I think it helps to go anywhere where people actually lived not that there's any magic in the atmosphere, but it forces you out of your world and makes you start thinking about their world. For instance, the layout of a plantation, the fact that this is the working entrance; it's the one that most people are familiar with, but the formal entrance was on the other side. This is familiar because the dome had to be put where the library was, and the dome is a commanding feature. But this is the side that faced out on a city, in a planta- tion. They had no cities in Virginia, they had no ports; so that a mansion, a great house of a plantation was like a town hall, it was open to entertain, it was where people met, where they concerted strategy. had to have people coming and going constantly in the plantation life.

So when you come to a plantation of this sort you realize what managerial skill went into the life of a plantation owner, and his wife, who had to take over when he was absent, as was often the case. You see the difficulties of the terrain that everybody had to cope with, Jefferson especially he invited trouble. You see how he tried to dispose of the slave quarters, the working quarters, the various things that are necessary to a plantation so that they were near, functioning, rationally organized, and yet invisible. One of the things that Palladio said was that in a good Roman villa the principle of the human body was observed, that the less decent parts of the body are hidden away in posterior and lower areas. Jefferson perfectly took that to heart when he puts his great house up here with an obstructed view in every direction and he sinks down the sides of the hill in steps all of the necessary function- ing parts of a plantation.

MOYERS: I know you called him the idealist as a practical man, and he never or was it the practical man as an idealist? (laughing)...

WILLS: Whichever, right.

MOYERS: He always struck me as more of a romantic. vague about Thomas Jefferson that....

There's something either way...

WILLS: Well, there's something mysterious, all right, especially mysterious to us. He was a sentimental man; I wouldn't say quite a romantic, because the eighteenth century put very great stock in sentiment, in lachrymosity. A Voltaire, a Diderot, said that the man of feeling is the man of virtue, the man who can enter into the feelings of all those around him and be touched and moved. Jefferson was an eighteenth-century man of sentiment. This spot was sentimental, when he was a boy; he and his friend got to know this spot and loved it, and they said the first one to die would be buried here by the other, and Dabney Carr is buried at the beginning of what is the Jefferson family graveyard. So he was a man of great feeling of that sort. One of his earliest and most important letters to Robert Skipwith is a defense of novels because they make us cry, because they make us realize that other people are hurting. He was an eighteenth-century man of sentiment. On the other hand, sentiment was not irrational to them, it was perfectly rational. It was part of the psychology of the day that a moral sense operating somewhat automatically was the highest faculty in man, and if you didn't get in its way it would show the natural benevolence of man and lead to sociability as the thing that makes most people happy.

MOYERS: Sociability meaning living in a society.

WILLS: Yes.

We have to have each other, not only for material needs but because, as we want to talk, which is a social action, we are satisfied only when we are engaging in intercourse mental and spiritual and every other kind with other human beings.

MOYERS: Do you think that Monticello is to his eighteenth-century science what the Declaration is to his eighteenth-century philosophy?

WILLS: Well, not quite, because this is an artifact; and it's something so personal to him, it's not a public statement, as perhaps the University of Virginia is. I would say the University of Virginia might be a kind of statement of his view of the rational life of man that's kind of enlightenment monastery. The Declaration was, first of all, functionally a propaganda piece; it had to be public, it couldn't be an expression of one man's personality; and it had to be something that was usable in the immediate fracas with the British. This is something that is not that useful and not that limited, either. As I say, it's a marvelous artifact, it's one of America's great masterpieces; it should rank with the greatest paintings or pieces of music that we have.

MOYERS: To what extent do you think it's fair to say that Jefferson did invent America?

WILLS: Well, I chose "invent" deliberately for its ambiguity, because it's easy to read anachronistically. He used "invent" normally as the eighteenth century did, to mean "discover" something that's already there. We use it to mean "create, create something out of material that precedes. And he did both, but I think the latter by accident. He didn't believe in original creation, he thought the laws of nature are all there and you discover them, and to the degree that you can discover them you can do worthwhile things. He thought, for instance, that the relationship of the width and the height of those columns were established mathematically by nature and that the only thing a builder should do is find out what are the proper proportions and then imitate them and don't change. For lots of reasons the intervening Romantic age, the various uses to which the Declaration had to be put -- we have read him in a series of differing ways, and we have made him, as it were, call America up out of nothing, give us the blueprint for America, the transcendent heavenly city plan..

MOYERS: A new chosen people.

WILLS: ...that we have to fill in. That's not the kind of mentality that Jefferson naturally gravitated toward. As I say, he was a measurer, he was an observer, he was empirical, he didn't believe in innate ideas or Platonic ideas, or he didn't believe in a soul; he was a thoroughgoing, absolutely scientific materialist; he thought that thought was to the body what magnetism is to a magnetized piece of metal, as he put it. So a good deal of the kind of metaphysical readings, the Romantic readings, the Aristotelian, Platonic readings that have been given to the Declaration are out of the atmosphere of his mind.

MOYERS: With night coming, we moved inside to finish our conversation, in Thomas Jefferson's bedroom.

(To Wills): What do you think he meant when he said much later that the Declaration expressed an American mind?

WILLS: Well, I suppose that a half-century later -- when, by the way, his memory was very bad over most of the testable events that we can check on that a half a century later he wanted to say to the charge of plagiarism that he was not foisting on the American Revolution some private little theory of his own but was going along with the development of the consensus. And it was a development. You have to remember that from 1765, the Stamp Act, there was terrific, speedy growth in change of arguments. For instance, I was taught in school, as I suppose you were, that the Revolution was fought over the issue of taxation without representation. It wasn't at all; that was an issue that was settled in 1765 and nobody wanted to bring it up again. John Adams said in 1775, "For God's sake, don't bring that up, they might give us representation. We don't want that, we don't want members in Parliament." That was an issue that had completely dropped out of people's minds. There was a terrific pressure forcing men to grow, to change their views. The foremost spokesmen of 1765 were suspect as old fogeys by 1776: John Dickinson, for instance, or Richard Bland. These were people whose day was over in ten years, so rapid was the pace of events. Jefferson himself said in 1775, "I would rather be ruled by the King of England than by any other king or than by no king. So one year before the Declaration he was saying he would pre- fer to have a king.

MOYERS: Sounds like a Tory.

WILLS: Yeah. 1765, Pennsylvania petitioned to the King to grant them status as a royal colony, not a proprietary; they wanted to be under the King. 1767, the New Yorkers put up a gold statue to the King. I think it's Richard B. Morris who said that one of the fascinating things about the American Revolution is the rapid disappearance of monarchic feelings after 1776, because they were very pronounced right down to the wire in 1776. But again, you have to remember that everybody was undergoing a kind of mutual education process. John Adams said that at the outset of the Continental Congress a third of the Americans were patriots, for independence, a third were loyalists and a third were apathetic.

And even in the third that were patriots there was tremendous division on the timing, the logistics, the strategy, whether to accept reconciliation, on what terms to accept reconciliation. So there was no American mind because flux and change were forcing everybody to change, everybody to undergo tremendous rapid growth.

MOYERS: What do you mean when you talk about the lost world of

Thomas Jefferson?

WILLS: Well, Jefferson has been very well studied from the 1780s on, but he was very poorly studied during that most formative time of his life, the 1760s, when he was in school, when his principal teachers and the people he owed most to in the intellectual world were dealing with him; and that happened because of a concatenation of accidents. His plantation, with all of his library and all of his early writings, burned down in 1770.

MOYERS: The one that was just at the foot of the hill.

WILLS: Just at the foot of this hill, his father's plantation that he had inherited. He was twenty-seven years old; he had been intensely trained by some very intelligent, bright people; he had, we presume, gone through all of the adolescent writings of a brilliant man, poetry and one book that was saved from that fire shows that he wrote marginal notations in his books -- all of that was lost. Then his tutor who was a brilliant man in his own right, died before he was forty went back to Birmingham and was lost to history. If he had lived he would have been

a very famous man.

MOYERS: This was William Small.

WILLS: William Small, who taught him at William and Mary. The records of William and Mary College have been destroyed. The school that was predominant in American educational circles in the 1760s has dropped out of history because people have lost interest in that particular approach to ethics. So if you put all those things together, you realize that in the 1760s when Jefferson was imbibing the kinds of things that Small was teaching and that were being taught in all the American colleges in the 1760s, you see that he went into the 1770s, when he wrote the Declaration and he wrote the "Notes on the State of Virginia," before he went to France, with a whole world that is not explored if you pick him up in France in the 1780s or if you pick him up in Philadelphia in the 1790s.

MOYERS: When you put this lost world back together, what were the dominant forces in it, the forces that you think intellectually shaped Jefferson?

WILLS: Well, in the English-speaking world in general in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Scottish philosophers had assumed tremendous importance -- Oxford and Cambridge were comparatively somnolent and a whole sequence of brilliant people at Edinburgh and Glasgow, Aberdeen had faced up to what was the most serious intellectual challenge of their day, namely: if you accept the mechanistic world of Newtonian physics and Lockean sensation, how is it possible for man to be free and how is it possible for man to exercise altruistic instincts? If man is a kind of billiard ball, kicked around by pleasure and pain and responding to it in a determined way, as Locke had said, then how can he be virtuous, how can he rise above simple mechanistic response to pleasure and pain? It was a tremendously serious problem. Mandeville, Hobbes and others had said that he couldn't, that that's all that he was, a kind of pleasure-pain machine. And the answer to that, which seized the imagination of all of Europe. the French, the Swiss, the English was given in 1725 by Francis Hutcheson, who took the billiard-ball world and...

MOYERS: He was a Scot.

WILLS: Yes, he was a Scot; he went to Glasgow and in a way launched the Scottish enlightenment in 1730. He took this billiard-ball world and he said but if you look at it, you do have pleasure which is not of a selfish sort in aesthetic contemplation; you see things, you enjoy them, not in a rapacious way, and you want to prolong that enjoyment, you want to share it. The more people see the beautiful thing with you, the more your pleasure. And the way you share it is by propagating it, by imitating rhythm and grace and beauty in your life; therefore the civiliz- ing is also the arts. He said the same thing is true of benevolence.

We are pleased at the mere sight of somebody doing good to another per- son. He said we cheer the hero, we hiss the villain. So that school, which as I say has dropped out of...

MOYERS: The moral sense school, it came to be known, didn't it?

WILLS: Yeah; right.

So that school, benevolence and prolong it is a moral sense.

He said that that appetite you have to enjoy the way they have an arm.

He says everybody has it exercise of some of the faculties you have, intellect or will or whatever,

It's a separate faculty, it's not simply an it's a separate faculty, and it's the highest faculty in man.

MOYERS: How do you know that Thomas Jefferson was directly influenced by the Scottish moral philosophers, and what significance did that influence have for him?

WILLS: Well, we know that he was because he gives an exposition of moral-sense thinking as early as 1771, before the Declaration, in his letter to Robert Skipwith; as early as 1781, before he went to France, in his "Notes on the State of Virginia, later when he went to France.

which were written then, though published are two other letters that are very important

He continued it all through his life: expositions of the sound Scottish view of the moral sense where he talks about its acting automatically there and being a function of every man being equal. At the end of his life, when he was corresponding with John Adams, Jefferson was very

And right to the very end taken with the French school, the new school then, of idéologues; Destutt de Tracy, for instance. And yet even though he was friendly with them and agreed with them on everything else, he said that they were quite wrong in thinking that there was no separate faculty called the moral sense. So from the earliest time we can pick him up, a year after the fire at Shadwell, straight through his life, he believed in the moral sense.

MOYERS: And what did it mean to him?

WILLS: Well, the impact on him was immense; it meant, among other things, that he considered men naturally sociable, that they didn't have to bargain into society from a kind of selfish vantage point...

MOYERS: Which was the Lockean route.

WILLS: At least one popular view of the Lockean attitude, that you don't contract interest over against interest and arrive at society by a kind of jujitsu of selfishness-unselfishness, arriving, going from individualism to society. The Scots all said you begin with society. fun of the idea of the original contract; he said we're social before we're

Hume made anything else, we're members of a family, we start communicating and communication is itself an act of trust, it's an acceptance of social conventions of language. And so in their view society didn't have to be created by man and didn't come from selfish instinct and from property, society was given.

MOYERS: This is one of the reasons, isn't it, that Jefferson admired Indian society. It had a sense of cohesion, it had a respect of one for another that he thought was quite admirable.

WILLS: Yes. He said that they didn't need a lot of institutions because they wanted to be in each other's good grace. They were what a modern anthropologist would call a shame society; that is, if an Indian ora- tor gets up and says that's beneath you, then the person will automatically reform because they don't want anybody to think bad of them.

Well, that was what Jefferson thought very close to the natural social instinct, so he did hold Indians in very high esteem.

MOYERS: What about the letter he wrote to his nephew in which he made the now classic statement, "State a moral case to a plowman and a professor. The plowman" -- the farmer "will decide it as well and often better than a professor.' What do you think he meant by that?

WILLS: Well, he meant by it what Thomas Reid meant by it, who said almost exactly the same thing, that the untrained moral sense, the one that you haven't inhibited in any way, is equal in men of high or low estate, of great or little training. And when he says that the plowman will often be better than the professor Reid had again said that superstition, the encrustations of false teachings, et cetera, will frequently make the more sophisticated person go astray where the simple person is using the simple faculty of the moral sense and not getting off into elaborate exercises of the reason upon the moral sense.

MOYERS: You have a paragraph in your book which says, "This moral sense gives man his unique dignity. It grounds his rights, it makes him self-governing. It is man's highest faculty, the basis of his moral accountability and the bond with other men. Thus, it had to be the basis, in Jefferson's view, for man's politics and political right." What do you mean, the moral sense had to be the basis for our politics?

WILLS: Well, if you and I are in a political order and I say we must do such-and-such because it is right and good, obviously I have no way to force you to do that unless I can appeal to the faculty for discerning what is right and moral and good in you. The same way as I say you cannot bind a person to observe a law unless you believe that he has responsibility to himself and to others. The moral sense is what tells you that you should do good, that you should enter into kindly intercourses with your fellows. And therefore, all social action follows on that. In the mechanical view of society that was given to people of the eighteenth century, it was to human motion what cosmic attraction -- all the forces of gravity was to the Newtonian world. And that parallel is pursued constantly in all of the literature. So that the pursuit of happiness, for instance, is another manifestation of this pursuit of benevolence, because to be benevolent and see benevolence is to have the highest happiness. So the very forces that get you into motion in social intercourse with other people are the ones that give you the highest satisfaction, they're the ones that most fit your nature, the best thing in you, the part of you that is most noble, most responsive to everyone else's solicitings of good.

MOYERS: Is this what Jefferson meant when he referred to a society based on ties of affections?

WILLS: Yes. His own theory of the Revolution was that once Americans left England to go to the Colonies they really owed nothing to the mother Parliament. He said that the Americans decided to adopt a common king out of affection for their brethren; they wanted to keep that tie with the British at home who had been the society in which they had been formed. And he said that only those brethren could destroy that bond by not acting like brethren, by themselves inflicting non-affectionate actions upon them. And of course that's what happened, he said, in the whole course of Parliamentary intrusions on colonial right. So that his own climax to the Declaration of Independence, which was excised by Congress, said that not only has the King not answered our petitions, not only has the Parliament kept on infringing our rights which were the subject of the petition, but the British people have supported the King in sending Scotch and other mercenaries to fight against their kindred and the British people have returned to Parliament the same people who were making these infringements of our rights; therefore, this has delivered the last stab to agonizing affection, and we do renounce these unfeeling brethren. That was his declaration of independence.

MOYERS: From the people of England.

WILLS: From the people of England.

MOYERS: In the context of the moral-sense school, what do you think Jefferson meant when he said: "All men are created equal"?

WILLS: Obviously he meant they have an equal moral sense. The noblest faculty in them is equal, therefore any differences in inferior faculties are comparatively unimportant.

MOYERS: How do you explain the letter, again, he wrote to his nephew when he said "the moral sense is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree"? Isn't that some kind of refutation?

WILLS: No. Because, as I said, everyone admitted Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Ferguson that the moral sense is in some way or other inhibited by lack of information, by lack of exercise; as Jefferson would say, everybody is given equal legs but if you lie shackled for the first twelve years of your life you're not going to be able to use them very well.

The particular case he took up in great detail of an apparently impaired moral sense was that of the slaves. He specifically says the slaves have the gifts of the heart, of the affection, of benevolence, and he lists the virtues that come directly from moral sense: gratitude, benevolence. And he says, now, unfortunately, slaves steal a lot which was true, by the way; it was a tribute to their independence that they had a kind of un- derground network. The slaves were not entirely beaten down, and it's a sign of their nobility in slavery...

MOYERS: At least of their ingenuity.

WILLS: Yeah. And he said that doesn't count because the moral sense is not allowed to operate in a society where there is no reciprocity of obligation.

MOYERS: They steal because of their condition, not because of their nature.

WILLS: Absolutely; absolutely. That doesn't mean that the moral sense, removed from this unnaturally inhibiting atmosphere, would not regain total equality, and that's what he said. And when he said that slaves should be trained for freedom, he wanted them taken as children away from the atmosphere in which they had been corrupted in this one respect, so that they would, grow up with their moral sense unimpaired. He had no doubt that they had that moral sense and that it was equal to a white man's.

MOYERS: So when Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal, he meant in effect that for all the differences between you and me in age, education, experience...

WILLS: Intellect.

MOYERS: Intellect, we are equal in our moral faculty...

WILLS: Right.

MOYERS: ...our capacity to...

WILLS: To see and to do good.

MOYERS: But if we accept, as you think Jefferson did accept the reality of our equality in the possession of a moral faculty, that we are equal morally, what follows from that, politically and practically?

WILLS: Well, I don't think that I accept Jefferson's view as he stated it because I don't have the cosmos that he dealt in; I don't believe in the Newtonian-Lockean mechanistic world that he took as a given. If we step out of that, it's like asking me to accept Aristotle's physics, say, and try to apply them today. Part of our problem is that if we read Jefferson properly, we can't read him anachronistically. We have to read him in the world of science that existed at the time, which was a quite different world from ours. His was a mechanical world, not a chemical world; it was not a physical world in the sense of our physics, it was much more a dynamics world. But if we step outside that, I think that certain analogs to his thought can be adopted today. For instance, if you begin with the idea that the law is made simply to protect the individual and his rights and he begins thinking about his rights over against everybody else's rights, you have made society almost impossible; you're trying to do the paradoxical, to create society out of selfishness. How can you create unity out of division? If you begin by saying that man's natural world is a world of giving and sharing, then the kinds of arrangements you make in society will be divisions of labor to bring out the virtue within people. And again, I don't want to be as entirely optimistic as Jefferson was. I don't believe, as I think he did believe, that man, with all of the problems of superstition and want and ignorance, et cetera, removed, is always totally benevolent; I don't think that there is a mystery of evil within man which Jefferson somewhat tended to downplay. And so did the Scots, by the way, as a kind of reaction, I suppose, from the Calvinist heritage they were fighting themselves free of.

Nonetheless, I think we can see that it's a much better worldview if you start out thinking that man's happiness does come from society, he is formed by society, he never exists in some hypothetical state of nature. We all depend upon each other. And if that's the case, then the proper way to go about politics is to divide labor in a way that allows everybody to make their own contribution with maximum freedom. And that's of course what Jefferson largely meant by pursuit of happiness, that man pursues happiness as a stone falls. The stone won't fall if you impose some obstacle in its way. And he thinks that that's what many governments, much religion, much education had done before that. He says if you take away all these obstacles and allow the stone to fall, if you take away from man the inhibitions on his marvelous ener- gy of benevolence, then everyone in the pursuit of happiness will promote happiness. And that formula is again something that is in Hume and Hutcheson, that the maximum pursuit of happiness will amount to the maximum promotion of happiness for everybody. In other words, you're not thinking of happiness as a zero sum thing and what I take out of the pot is denied to other people. Happiness grows for the community by growing within the individual, if it's virtuous happiness.

MOYERS: What do you think Jefferson meant by happiness, before we get to the pursuit of it?

WILLS: The fulfillment of nature, the ability to follow the promptings of nature.

MOYERS: What do you mean?

WILLS: Well, "hap" of itself means fit; happenstance, and what haps. And "happy" is something that fits a person's nature. He says it's the nature of man to know, for instance. And so obstacles, censorship, the refusal of literacy to various classes, all of those things thwart that pursuit of happiness which is an obvious inbuilt energy of man. And you're fighting nature when you in any way inhibit man's pursuit of knowledge. So he said the job of society is, for all of our good and our mutual satisfaction, to remove as many obstacles as we can in the way of man's pursuit of knowledge.

MOYERS: And in other pursuits, too.

WILLS: Sure but then you have to remember that he did not think that the pursuit of selfishness was a real satisfaction. The highest happiness is benevolence, and if you don't know that, then again you're ignorant, you're operating under an inhibition. So that insofar as people begin to know and experience and measure and evaluate happiness, they will realize that virtue is the highest happiness.

MOYERS: That is basically a private happiness, but he also talked, didn't he, of a public happiness?

WILLS: Well, he didn't see that there was any conflict. the thing: See, that's in the Lockean world you can talk about the private over against the public, but in the Hutchesonian world there really is no private. None of us is isolated, and none of our joys is really isolated; so the conflict between the private and the public was not something that arose in quite the same way. Now, they did believe in selfish interest and knew it could fight against benevolence. In fact, Hutcheson worked out algebraic formulae which pitted "I" against "thee" and that kind of thing. And he said that interest is fine if it cooperates with benevolence, it just adds an- other impetus to things. If it fights against it and overcomes it, then it's bad. But a kind of selfishness, he said, is as necessary to benevolence as mass is necessary to gravity. Say benevolence is gravity. Gravity can't move anything around unless there are cohesive bodies, and the thing that makes a body cohere is a certain regard for oneself; you have to have that. He says virtue is impossible unless you have a person that can act virtuously. If I'm not alive, if I'm not free I can't do good for others. Their argument against slavery was that it took away from a man the right to be benevolent. A slave didn't have any free will, so you took away from him his highest faculty, the right to do good to others.

MOYERS: How do you explain Jefferson's continuing to hold on to his slaves when he was so obviously influenced by the moral school?

WILLS: He was, and by the way, they were much more advanced than the Lockeans in their attitude towards slavery. Hutcheson, for instance, entirely repudiated Locke's view that a captive in war could be held as slave. He thought that slaves should be freed, but he thought that there were so many mutual wrongs inflicted between blacks and whites that the affection necessary for a single society was not there so they would have to be deported, they would have to go somewhere else and be free. This doesn't say they're inferior; he thought that Americans and the British had to be separated because of the infliction of unfeeling acts upon brethren.

MOYERS: But wasn't he granting the blacks their rights as a people but not as individuals when he took that position?

WILLS: Well, as I say, there is no such thing as an individual in that world. They have to have a community. And that bring it down to practical matters. Jefferson, as a matter of law and economics, could not free his slaves. In Virginia you could not just free a slave if you wanted to, for a lot of reasons. For one thing, a lot of ters would obviously say, "Fine, I'll free the sick, the ill, the drones, the rebellious, the troublemakers. I'll just free them. I won't have to support them.

And it's been estimated that a good deal of the time at least a third of the slave force were unproductive; you had to take care of the ones who were old, sick, infants, nursing, et cetera. So what would you do with these slaves, just free them? They would be preying on society or preyed upon by it, they'd be destroyed. All right, then, say you want to free a slave of sound mind and body. What do you do? How do you do that? In Jefferson's day you had to go down to the courthouse right here in Charlottesville, the one that's standing there, and you had to prove that you had given that person a trade and a place to exercise it, or money to get out, because there was no place for such a slave to go. There were no towns or ports in Virginia, there was no proletariat; Vir- ginia lived on the great plantations along the rivers. When you set a slave free, where would he work? What would he do? Whom would he marry? How would he bring up his children? So in order to free the slave you had to have capital, you had to have invested capital in him in giving him a skill and the means to exercise it or in giving him money. Now, Jefferson had at one time over 200 slaves, but his only capital was his land. His land was worthless without cheap labor. So if he wanted to free his slaves, what would he put up as capital, his land? His land had no value without the slaves. He was in a vicious circle. So it was against the laws of Virginia for him to free more than a handful of slaves that he could have got together the capital for. Now, he thought that piecemeal emancipation was in the long run harmful, that the free man was not wanted anywhere; he was feared even more by small landholders than by big ones. To be a free man in Virginia in those days you really had to bear arms. You had to hunt and you had to defend yourself. They didn't want blacks bearing arms. And anyone who did that would find themselves in very great trouble very fast.

MOYERS: So his answer, theoretically, was to deport them, to send them back...

WILLS: He said you have to collect the money, through taxation and other means, form a school to train every slave born after date certain, train them up to freedom and allow them to go off someplace that Virginia would get, and let them grow up and let their parents die off on the plantations, supported till their death by the plantation owners. And that's an interesting thing; it's another example of his belief in the cohesiveness and the ethos of a society that he wanted to launch this brave new society of blacks to grow up free, to be trained to freedom and not to have memories of slavery. And so the old people would have to die off and be supported by the plantation owners, although it was obviously not to their advantage to have nonproductive slaves living on for some years. He said that in order to do that they would have to bring in white laborers, indentured laborers. So it was a very complex scheme, he spelled it out in great detail in his "Notes on Virginia," which was addressed to the French as a very enlightened document in which he tried

So to prove that Americans have the most enlightened view of society. It's said he thought it was a very good scheme, he supported it all his life; he never was in favor of piecemeal or individual manumission.

MOYERS: Does this kind of examination of the world of Jefferson lead us closer to an egalitarian society? There has for a number are created equal, and what else is egalitarianism?

WILLS: Well, I would hope. After all, the Declaration says all men f reasons been in America a kind of opposition to fraternity. that the French wanted liberty, equality and fraternity; but Americans wanted their rights and legal shuffling of documents, that we didn't begin with an ideal of fraternity. Actually, I think we did, and not only in Jefferson but in Madison and in everybody who studied the Scottish school. The reason that fraternity became suspect, I suppose, is that in the nineteenth century, in the Industrial Revolution, the costs of rapid expansion were so obvious that the sentimental school, the benevolence school rebelled against some of the ruthlessness of progress. they got pushed aside by the classical liberals and the benevolence school faded off into romanticism of the Carlyle-Ruskin-William Morris-Keats- Shelley sort, the brotherhood of man became a kind of ineffectual thing; and industrialism became a matter of ruthless competition, individualism,

So that whole trauma Darwinian survival of the fittest, social Darwinism. of the Industrial Revolution, occurring in England and in America, made people suspect fraternity as kind of soft and dreamy and not able to survive in the workaday world. So that in the gilded age in America, when admittedly, prodigies of expansion took place, there was this feeling that poetry and virtue and preachiness was sissy stuff and that the real what's in it for tough politics is the politics of selfish bargaining me, what's in it for you. A perfect example of that is the way the parties have become openly representative of various interests. in the eighteenth century, of course, Madison and others didn't want parties, they didn't want faction, they wanted disinterestedness, they wanted virtue. Madison's tenth Federalist paper, which Adair has traced to Hume's views, says that man is freed to be virtuous as you get away from the selfish local interests.

MOYERS: We have just the opposite of that in our society today.

WILLS: Yes.

MOYERS: Members of Congress, members of the House, members of the Senate, even Presidents are buffeted about by local special interest groups.

WILLS: Well, as I say, the way to accomplish good is to have everybody in there grabbing for themselves and out of that competition you will hone instincts so that people will be productive and then the over- we won't actually spill to the less productive will keep them alive get rid of the unfit with our survival of the fittest, but we will make life better for everybody by sharpening the competitive instincts of these few.

MOYERS: And that's been the view that has prevailed. More or less.

WILLS: Well, it's the view that is represented by one strain in our thought. I think the other view has always been there in some measure, and I think that our politics is not -- that doesn't really represent our politics any more than the eighteenth century picture. Our politics is really a matter not so much of competition but of compromise. Politicians are in that sense, they don't rise to this disinterested virtue, but they do try to mute hostilities, to lessen differences. The great gift of a politician is to prevent divisiveness, to be a social glue. And so in an odd way they do work for the common good and not for the private good. But to make a comparison of that sort we would have to go into so many differences and similarities. But what I'm saying is that the ideal of fraternity was there; it's a recoverable ideal in many respects, it seems to me; and Americans actually do feel a bond with each other which is deeper than law, which is based on shared experiences, loved things. Why do people respond to the flag, to appeals to their better nature? Not because there's a law that says they have to do that. In The Federalist Papers Madison said, we're asking you to accept a Constitution.

You can find every kind of way that that Constitution might offend you. But if you look at every law that way we'd never have any law, he said. You have to look to the basic comity, the amity that can exist between men.

MOYERS: You've got a new book, The Confessions of a Conservative. You consider yourself a conservative.

WILLS: Sure. I consider myself a conservative because the American political system operates conservatively, it operates to hold the community together. There's no time when the community is more united than the end of an election, no matter how strenuously fought and no matter how close the margin of victory afterward. One of the things that's fascinating to me is that when people say a political campaign, a presidential campaign is full of silly debate and no issues and all that kind of thing, they're quite true. And yet to follow one around, as I have several times, follow the candidates through, is to see a great ritual of togetherness. The political campaign becomes a kind of national rite of renewal not so much because of what's said as by the coming together of everybody, wanting to say that this is the best kind of government we can hope for that we're striving to achieve, and among other things, just enjoying each other's company. There's a lot of fun in the political convention, it's of course our great sports event, too; it's the one thing that everybody participates in or watches in some measure more than any World Series or Superbowl or whatever. So I find all of this very conservative in a nonpartisan sense, but in a very obvious sense; there's nothing doctrinaire or weird about that, I think.

MOYERS: Were the moral philosophers, including Thomas Jefferson, wrong about human nature? Were they wrong about our capacity to be benevolent toward one another?

WILLS: Well, I don't think they were entirely right. I think, as I said, there is a kind of mysterious evil in man that accounts for Calvinist and other views of man which also have their validity. I think they were quite right, though, in saying that man's highest happiness

And to is in sharing happiness with others, that that's observably true. set that as a social goal was, I suppose, in some ways radical in its day and has represented some of the best things in this nation and in other nations that have followed.

MOYERS: How do you think Jefferson might regard our society today in this light? Would he smile on it?

WILLS: I hope so; I think he would approve of as much in this society as he did in the society of his day. He'd love the technology and science. I think he would understand the limits of politics; he certainly experienced some of those himself. And he saw that the nation is not the same as its that government, a people is not the same thing as its institutions, there is a comity, an energy of life shared underneath all those things which keeps them going, not vice-versa.

MOYERS :From Monticello, this has been a conversation with Garry Wills, author of Inventing America.

I'm Bill Moyers.