Better Pen Than Practice

JEFFERSON & CIVIL LIBERTIES by Leonard W. Levy. 225 pages. Belknap. $4.50.

If there is any truth held to be self-evident, it is that Thomas Jefferson was the father of American liberties. Anyone doubting the dogma, like Henry Adams or Albert Beveridge, has been dismissed as a crotchety old conservative. Now a Brandeis University historian has compared Jefferson's actions with his glowing words, and found the two a chasm apart "Jefferson's pen," writes Leonard Levy, "was mightier than his practice."

Jefferson's principles as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence were exemplary but he had trouble applying them to specific situations. He was not a genuine thinker like James Madison or John Adams, who hammered out a consistent theory of liberty. He cheerfully assumed he knew the truth and, much like the fanatics of the French Revolution, always thought he was expressing the will of the people.

Throttling the Press. As a leading member of the lower house of the Vir ginia legislature during the Revolutionary War, Jefferson supported a loyalty oath requiring all males over 16 to swear aliegiance to the state. Those refusing were forced to pay triple taxes and stripped of their civil rights. He also helped pass a bill to round up Tories and ship them to designated areas in the interior. He drafted a bill of attainder-which in effect condemns the victim without a trial--against a group of Tories who were plundering the countryside.

Levy cites evidence to argue that Jefferson was just as careless of civil liberties as a peacetime President. Angered by vicious journalistic attacks on him, he advocated "wholeseome prosecutions to restore the integrity of the presses." With Jefferson's tacit approval, a federal judge whom he had appointed secured indictments against a group of publishers and clergymen for libeling the Government. Charges were dropped only after it became clear that one of the ministers had facts and figures to back up a gamy story that the President had once attempted to seduce a friend's wife.

When the erratic Aaron Burr started recruiting men in Louisiana for some mysterious purpose, most likely an invasion of Mexico, Jefferson panicked. He feared that Burr meant to seize New Orleans and detach the Western U.S. Though Burr had been cleared by a federal grand jury, Jefferson pronounced him guilty of treason and had him arrested. When Chief Justice John Mar shall refused to hold Burr on a treason charge for lack of evidence, Jefferson demanded a constitutional amendment making federal judges removable by the President.

War Against Americans. During the Napoleonic Wars, when both Britain and France were stopping U.S. ships and seizing their cargo, Jefferson clamped an embargo on all foreign trade. His aim was to keep the U.S. from being dragged into war, but he succeeded only in paralyzing the U.S. economy.

When merchants tried to circumvent the embargo, Jefferson had Congress pass what Levy calls the "most repressive and unconstitutional legislation ever enacted in peacetime." The army was empowered to invade homes to seize any goods suspected of leaving the country. The Fourth Amendment (forbidding arbitrary search) was repeatedly violated; rules of evidence were suspended when merchants were brought to trial. Though Jefferson had always opposed a large standing army as inimical to liberty, he asked to increase the army by 50,000 men in a frenzied effort to enforce the law. Under tremendous pressure from constituents, Congress balked, and soon the embargo was lifted. "To avoid foreign war," writes Levy, "Jefferson made domestic war."

Jefferson was a politician of considerable vision and audacity. He created the first national political party in the U.S.; he made a strong President; he purchased the Louisiana Territory. As head of a new, struggling nation, he had to cope with real dangers, even if he exaggerated them. Levy's polemic deals with only one aspect of Jefferson, as Levy readily admits, but an aspect that has been too long ignored. Historians serve neither Jefferson nor the truth by making him the embodiment of all wisdom and benevolence.

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