I want to point out that intentions can generally be read on a persons face. I have a theory that part of the reason that Europeans discovered America first was because they had more of a desire for travel and exploration. The feature that reveals our need to explore can be found on the nose.
I have read his biography and found many things he believed to be as relevant to this day as they were in his time. He believed that egalitarian governments worked for smaller populations. So, in effect, you can enjoy a sense of communism in a small community where everybody knows each other. But when the population gets to be too large, then there needs to be leaders who run a government with a stronger hand.
The larger populations get a little more complex to run. When you have too many people, not everybody has the time to interact with each other as much. Then, you will need representatives of each community to help speak for the group of people. Of course, there is always risk of misrepresentation and corruption to develop. It’s very hard to shame strangers.
Jefferson lived in a time in politics when he worked with smaller populations. He found that communication was reasonable, but response time was worse, especially in writing letters. But you can’t govern the people through the single act of letter writing. It’s meeting people in more fluid ways that count as an impression on your behavior. As the populations quickly grew, it became more difficult to maintain the pace of meeting people.
Threats from Britain were still strong, especially in Jeffersons mind. Who can he trust when it’s impossible to look everyone in the eye? He needed to break away, in many cases, from the lifestyle where everyone has equal footing, in order to set the US government further a part from British influence. There were still sympathizers who acted as double agent spies.
Jefferson noted that the Indians lived very egalitarian lives with no structure to their tribes. Jefferson thought that was fine for the Indians, but a growing population of European settlers in a new growing Nation needed more structure. The Indians didn’t exactly absorb the new European cultures readily. It took a lot of convincing and wars to change the Indians minds away from egalitarian lives.
I talked to an Indian woman the other day. She is 75% Indian and lived for a while on tribal lands in Cumberland. She left the land because it was getting depressing for her. She said a lot of her friends have died and all the people do on the tribal lands is drink alcohol or do drugs. They are very poor to this day. Did Jefferson see this result in his day? Did he think we could overrun the Indians and drive them to government located Reservations like this?
Jefferson was scared of British influence in his day. He though the British might control the West. He thought the British would have influence over the Indians, possibly convincing the Indians to bow to the King. Since the Indians were very resistant to settlers migrating west across the Nation, Jefferson decided on sending exploratory teams.
The exploratory teams discovered new lands and the tribal natives who inhabited them. It was mostly a discovery adventure to learn of the kind of British influence that could possibly develop. Maybe Jefferson could have come to a reasonable conclusion that even the British couldn’t tame the wild Indians of the Western areas. Either way, it took a lot of effort to explore the new territories that were dangerous and had no roads. No roads mean slow progress across the lands.
Indians never seemed to develop the kind of fear of other Nations controlling their lands as much as the infant US feared Britain. The Indians were much braver than the Europeans or naive. Either way, when two Nations were competing against each other as Jefferson was against the British, egalitarian lifestyles start to become just another casualty in the war.
Carefully Choosing Words 