ABSTRACT
The career of Thomas Jefferson beautifully illustrates the contradictory tendencies in the Enlightenment program. Born in the agrarian elite of Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century, he studied Latin, Greek, and French as a boy, entering the College of William & Mary at age 16, poring over the writings of John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton. A polymath, he learned to play the violin and steeped himself in a wide range of fields, ranging from the classics, philosophy, metaphysics, and mathematics. Heir to an estate of 5,000 acres and numerous slaves, Jefferson spent lavishly on creating a stunning mansion at Monticello that he personally designed along neoclassical lines. At Monticello he exercised his inventiveness: designing mechanically driven furniture, an ascending bed, automatic folding doors, and an ingenious wine bottle elevator connecting his wine collection in the cellar to his dining room. In short, Jefferson shared with the Enlightenment elites of Europe a fascination with scientific rationality and invention embodying scientific reasoning in practical engineering applications. As Minister to France between 1785 and 1789, Jefferson deepened his knowledge of French and British advances in the practical application of science. In 1785, in Paris, he visited the workshop of Honoré Blanc, a military blacksmith working in an experimental workshop. Blanc’s mission was developing a novel method of turning out muskets in a standardized fashion. Enjoying the support of the French artillery service, Blanc was assembling flintlock mechanisms, drawing components – tumblers, cocks, screws, and springs – out of bins each devoted to one component. What impressed Jefferson was the principle of modular assembly: creating large volumes of interchangeable parts that later on would be fit together, reducing costs through scientifically informed engineering while simultaneously enforcing product standards. On his return to the United States, Jefferson shipped a bundle of gunlocks to his newly founded nation; upon his arrival in his homeland he became a fervent advocate for the employ of interchangeable parts in the manufacture of small arms. Indeed, soon after Jefferson’s return to his country, the army’s Ordinance Department underwrote the application of Blanc’s principles in its Springfield and Harpers Ferry arsenals.2 Visiting
England during his assignment to France, Jefferson visited a steam driven flour milling factory, the engine’s tremendous potential for generating inanimate energy making an equally compelling impression. Indeed, he envisioned the application of steam power to locomotion, a vision that was soon realized with the rapid spread of steam railroads in the antebellum United States.3 In sum, Jefferson hoped the United States would be the beneficiary of a scientific rationalism that was largely the product of intellectual elites in Europe. At the same time Jefferson was committed to the political principles of the Enlightenment as Americans understood the message of classical British liberalism: individual liberty, equality, and the spread of democracy as a political system best designed to protect the natural human right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In his political agenda Jefferson took the position that the best way to fashion a republic founded on Enlightenment ideals was by fostering local democratic decision making by an informed, literate, populace of family farmers. Yet as a member of the Southern elite Jefferson benefited from coerced slave labor at Monticello and he wished to draw upon the cornucopia of inventions largely ushering out of the ranks of British and French elites. True – as Mokyr (2002, 2009) reminds us – the Industrial Enlightenment in Great Britain bubbled out of a knowledge cauldron in which theories put forward by elite philosophers and scientists mixed with the practical experience of non-elite mechanics. Still, elites played a disproportionate role in promoting the Enlightenment ideal. How could these two tendencies – the potential elitism of scientific rationality and the egalitarian democratic agenda – be best reconciled? The answer that Jefferson and his colleagues who drafted the American Constitution arrived at was the democratization of invention. In practice this meant placing in the Constitution a Congressional mandate to create and maintain an accessible patent system providing short term private property rights for technical breakthroughs. And it meant guaranteeing widespread public access to knowledge of state of art technology through freedom of the press, basic literacy, and minimal copyright protection for the authors of books and articles appearing in newspapers, technical journals, and magazines publishing information about technical advances for mass audiences.4 In short, Jefferson’s Janus faced attraction to the scientific technological implications of the Enlightenment and to the egalitarian ideals underpinning political philosophy of the Enlightenment was realized in the writing of the American Constitution: Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 requires Congress to establish and maintain a patent system; and the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and the press. That the group of political elites who drafted the wording of the Constitution – pushing it through numerous state conventions established to debate and then ratify it – testifies to the fact that the well informed body politic of the late eighteenth century United States adhered to the basic principles enshrined in the document. The thesis of this chapter is that Jefferson’s approach to reconciling the imperative of promoting widespread diffusion of scientific rationality in the form
of cost-reducing inventions with the egalitarian ideal of equality of opportunity as realized in the basic institutional blueprint for the United States promoted high rates of factor augmentation in the nineteenth century. Land was augmented; capital was augmented; and so was labor. This was especially important in creating and diffusing a general purpose technology throughout the antebellum United States, the American System of Manufactures.5
