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Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood

This book emphasizes the centrality of nationhood to Thomas Jefferson’s

thought and politics, envisioning Jefferson as a cultural nationalist
whose political project sought the alignment of the American state
­system with the will and character of the nation. Jefferson believed that
America was the one nation on earth able to realize in practice univer-
sal ideals to which other peoples could only aspire. He appears in the
book as the narrator of what he once called “American Story”: as the
historian, the sociologist, and the ethnographer; the political theorist of
the nation; the most successful practitioner of its politics; and its most
enthusiastic champion. The book argues that reorienting Jefferson
around the concept of American nationhood recovers an ­otherwise
­easily missed coherence to his political career and helps make sense of
a number of conundrums in his thought and practice.

Brian Steele is assistant professor of history at the University of

Alabama, Birmingham. His work has appeared in the Journal of
American History and the Journal of Southern History.


Cambridge Studies on the American South

Series Editors
Mark M. Smith, University of South Carolina, Columbia
David Moltke-Hansen, Center for the Study of the American South, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Interdisciplinary in its scope and intent, this series builds on and extends Cambridge
University Press’s long-standing commitment to studies on the American South. The
series not only will offer the best new work on the South’s distinctive institutional,
social, economic, and cultural history but will also feature works in a national,
comparative, and transnational perspective.

Titles in the Series

Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of
American Nationhood
Christopher Michael Curtis, Jefferson’s Freeholders and the Politics of Ownership
in the Old Dominion
Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry
Jonathan Daniel Wells, Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century
South
Thomas Jefferson and American
Nationhood

Brian Steele
University of Alabama, Birmingham
cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,
Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City

Cambridge University Press

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107020702

© Brian Steele 2012

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2012

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

Steele, Brian Douglas, 1970–
Thomas Jefferson and American nationhood / Brian Steele,
University of Alabama, Birmingham.
pages cm. – (Cambridge studies on the American South)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-02070-2
1. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826 – Political and social views. 2. Jefferson,
Thomas, 1743–1826 – Philosophy. 3. United States – Politics and
government – Philosophy. I. Title.
e332.2.s77 2012
973.4′6092–dc23    2012013662

ISBN 978-1-107-02070-2 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents

Acknowledgments page ix
Key to Brief Citations xiii

Introduction: Jefferson’s America 1

1. American Story 11
A People in the Empire 12
Nation Past 18
Nation Present 37
Nation Future 46
2. American Woman 53
Civilization, Equality, and Gender 58
“Amazons and Angels” 64
Gender and Prosperity 72
Aristocracy and Masculinity 77
Complications and Conclusions 83
3. American Character 91
The Trouble with Europe 95
American “Spirit” 100
American Exceptionalism? 123
4. American Public 131
Public Capacity, Public Cultivation 132
American Aristocracy 141
Public Opinion 157
Nation and Difference 169
5. American State 187
“Till Anglomany . . . Yields to Americanism” 189
“A Sect Which Is All Head and No Body” 195
Foreign Policy of Anglomany 216
The Public and Its State 226
Outfederalizing the Federalists? 232

vii
viii Contents

6. American Union 237

The Kentucky Resolutions and American Federalism 241
Coercion and the Limits of Harmonious Union 265
Epilogue: America’s Jefferson 291

Index 315
Acknowledgments

“All this was given to you. . .”

This book has its earliest roots in a paper written for an inspired senior
­seminar with Lawrence Cress at the University of Tulsa and a disserta-
tion written at the University of North Carolina under the direction of Don
Higginbotham. Neither man lived to see the book; both shaped it in fundamen-
tal ways, and, I might add, altered the course of my life.
Among the other teachers who inspired me, I must, for the pleasure of men-
tioning them, single out Paul Dykes and Judith Kimrey at Booker T. Washington
High School; Thomas Buckley at the University of Tulsa; and Harry Watson,
Peter Coclanis, and Lloyd Kramer at Carolina. I understand even more today
how much I owe to each of them. Harry, in particular, deserves a medal – and
perhaps a therapist’s license – for his open door and unfailing kindness.
My colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Alabama at
Birmingham have been universally supportive and have provided a stimulating
environment in which to think, teach, and write. I have benefited from know-
ing each of them. Andrew Keitt and Ray Mohl, extraordinary mentors in word
and deed, each in his own way, has made this book possible and my life better.
Neither has ever once disputed my childlike presumption that a closed door
did not apply to me. Danny Siegel, Michele Forman, John Moore, and Mary
Whall have also become valued friends – and mentors – here.
Dick Latner gave me my first job at Tulane University. I will always be grate-
ful to him and the members of that department as well as the students I taught
there and who taught me, in turn. Jim Tent, chair of the department my first
few years at UAB, was generosity itself to me. I do not underestimate the value
of his particular care or what it has meant to my family and to my ability to
complete this project. Carolyn Conley, our current chair, has been supportive
as the tenure clock ticked; I’ve learned much from her storehouse of knowl-
edge. Tennant McWilliams, dean when I first arrived, understood the mean-
ing of scholarship and its indispensability to good teaching; his enthusiasm
infected me from the beginning. I am grateful for the UAB Advance grant that

ix
x Acknowledgments

bought me a course release one semester and the laptop on which the majority
of the manuscript was composed.
Andrew O’Shaughnessy at the International Center for Jefferson Studies gave
me two months of uninterrupted time to write in the inspirational environs of
Monticello. More, he offered consistently cheerful and enthusiastic support for
my project. Endrina Tay, also at ICJS, offered me a “word fitly spoken” at just
the right time. What a gift. Christa Dierksheide was extraordinarily generous
with her time and knowledge and continues to be a trusted friend and adviser
on all things Jefferson.
Conversations and various exchanges with Matthew Crow, Johann Neem,
Rob McDonald, and Frank Cogliano – perhaps the finest Jefferson scholars of
this generation – have been enormously challenging and exciting even as they
have convinced me that I don’t understand the half of it. Matt and Johann fun-
damentally shaped the way I read Jefferson; Johann read drafts of three of the
chapters and offered invaluable suggestions for sharpening the argument. Rob
and Frank both gave me opportunities to write through ideas that eventually
made their way into the book, which is the stronger for their generosity and
editorial guidance. Rob has been a valued friend for many years.
Kris Ray read portions of the manuscript and always challenged me to think
bigger, as he does. Ruth Homrighaus stepped in at a crucial moment with her
customary combination of ruthless editing and gentle guidance and affirma-
tion. I am very grateful to John Boles for his support and encouragement at an
early stage in the development of the argument.
Peter Onuf has surpassed his already extraordinary reputation for gener-
osity. As he has with almost every scholar writing on Jefferson today, he has
become a much appreciated surrogate mentor to me, and my debt to his schol-
arship will be clear in the pages that follow. My experience of his kindness
and humor leaves fewer traces on the printed page; I acknowledge it here and
thank him.
I owe an enormous debt, both intellectual and personal, to Paul Rahe, who
read the entire manuscript in draft and offered invaluable guidance. His care-
ful critique forced me to greater precision in many places and saved me from
embarrassing errors in others. His support, in spite of certain fundamental
disagreements with the argument, is a credit to his generosity.
I join a very long list of students and scholars grateful to William Leuchtenburg
for an example, perhaps unattainable, of scholarship and integrity. Bill read the
entire dissertation and portions of the draft manuscript, which might seem well
outside his field of expertise were such limits applicable in his case. I appreciate
him most for his fundamental decency, which I have experienced, in ways large
and small, for many years now.
Chris and Mary Meyers, James and Joy Nelson, Margaret Myers, Susan
Myers, and Mike Ross all transformed New Orleans into a city teeming with
happy memories, much as David and Amelia O’Dell and Ben Huffman did for
Chapel Hill.
Acknowledgments xi

With more space and ability, I would be justified in writing a volume on each
of the following friends. As a substitute, I will simply affirm my love and admi-
ration for Jonathan Weiler, Steve Keadey, Spencer Downing, Adam Tuchinsky,
Karl and Elizabeth Davis, Bill Estes, and Mike Wilhoit: “I cannot tell how my
ankles bend . . . nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,/ Nor the cause of the
friendship I emit . . . nor the cause of the friendship I take again.”
David Voelker read every word of the manuscript, some of them many
times, and often at a moment’s notice. If Emerson is right to say that a friend
is “a person with whom I may be sincere” and who handles shortcomings with
“tenderness,” then David is surely the best of friends. He has long enlarged “the
meaning of all my thoughts.” One might search a lifetime for a more virtuous
soul.
The book is much better for its time at Cambridge University Press. I had
heard that Lewis Bateman sets the standard for professionalism and efficiency
in academic editing. I heard correctly. Anne Lovering Rounds went beyond
the call of duty in ways I very much appreciate. Both overlooked the numer-
ous mistakes of a freshman author. The Press’s anonymous readers clearly
knew what they were about. I took every one of their invaluable suggestions
as seriously as they engaged my manuscript; their work strengthened the thing
immeasurably.
The portions of this work that have appeared in other forums are all the
better for the careful attention of editors and anonymous readers. Chapter 2 is
a slightly revised version of “Thomas Jefferson’s Gender Frontier,” Journal of
American History, 95 (June 2008), 17–42. Chapter 3 is a revised and expanded
version of “‘The Yeomanry of the United States are not the canaille of Paris’:
Thomas Jefferson, American Exceptionalism, and the Spirit of Democracy,”
in Robert M. S. McDonald, ed., Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the
Politics of Knowledge (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012),
19–46. Portions of Chapter 6 first appeared in slightly different form as
“Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union,” Journal
of Southern History, LXXIV, No. 4 (November 2008), 823–854. And the
Epilogue is a shortened and revised version of “Jefferson’s Legacy: The Nation
as Interpretative Community,” in Francis D. Cogliano, ed., The Blackwell
Companion to Thomas Jefferson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012), 526–550. I
am grateful to the publishers and editors of each, both for the original publica-
tions and for permission to reprint here.
Ruffin and Melissa Snow, in-laws from heaven, have made my way pleasant
and have given me an extended family of incredible warmth and fun: Joel and
Bradley, Daniel and Jenny, Lowell and Peggy have all enriched my life in ways
too numerous to recount.
Brandon and Betsy, my life is irrevocably bound up with yours. I’m grateful
to have such good and faithful siblings. And for new ones in Jen and Spencer.
Jennifer Snow and our four wonderful children, Gretchen, Cora, Christopher,
and Graham, our pearls of great price, have endured the writing of this book
xii Acknowledgments

and have given me a life apart from it. The very “earth is metamorphosed” in
their hands.
I dedicate the book to Don Higginbotham, whose generosity, guiding hand,
and fundamental goodness are deeply missed; to Sam Ramer, whose friendship
buoyed me in dark times and light; and to my mother and father, who raised
me to understand that there is something better than mammon. All of the above
suggests that they were right. And to Jennifer, who reminds me every day.
“May I prove to be deserving of that high company.”
Key to Brief Citations

AHR American Historical Review

AJL Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The
Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and
Abigail and John Adams, 2nd ed., (Chapel Hill, 1987)
FE Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson,
Federal Edition, 12 vols. (New York, 1904–1905)
JAH Journal of American History
JER Journal of the Early Republic
JSH Journal of Southern History
LC Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress
L&B Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., The
Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C.,
1903–1904)
Notes Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1784),
ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, 1954)
PAH Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton,
25 vols. (New York, 1961–1977)
PJM William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James
Madison (Chicago and Charlottesville, 1962–)
PTJ Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 34
vols. to date (Princeton, 1950–).
PTJ, Retirement J. Jefferson Looney, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson,
Series Retirement Series, 8 vols. to date (Princeton, 2004–)
ROL James Morton Smith, ed., The Republic of Letters: The
Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison, 1776–1826, 3 vols. (New York, 1995)
TJW Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New
York, 1984).
WJA Charles Francis Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, 10
vols. (Boston, 1850–1856).
WMQ William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series

xiii
Introduction
Jefferson’s America

My affections were first for my own country, and then generally for all mankind.
Thomas Jefferson 18111

Jefferson’s most enduring love affair was with America. Onto it he projected
some of his deepest longings, and he drew sustenance from its reciprocal affec-
tion. He neglected his family, his farm, and his books for it and at times seemed
to abandon cherished principles and to forsake the world itself for its service.
He must have been particularly gratified to hear John Adams admit that “the
nation was with you,” because his “yearning for” its “sympathy,” as Henry
Adams later suggested, “was almost feminine” and a “loss of popularity was
his bitterest trial.”2 Jefferson long insisted that his principles were “unquestion-
ably the principles of the great body of our fellow citizens,” and, in point of
fact, Henry Adams noted, “every one admitted that Jefferson’s opinions, in one
form or another, were shared by a majority of the American people.” Jefferson’s
“visionary qualities seemed also to be a national trait,” much to the dismay of
the Federalists.3 Jefferson had a palpable sense that his own life would always
be bound up with America’s, for good or ill – that his own fame and legacy
depended to a large extent on America’s future greatness. His relationship with
America, then, was symbiotic, and his own assertions about America occasion-
ally verged on the autobiographical. His claim to have expressed the sentiments

1
Thomas Jefferson (hereinafter “TJ”) to Thomas Law, January 15, 1811, PTJ, Retirement Series,
3:298–299.
2
John Adams to TJ, May 1, 1812, in AJL, 301; Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson
Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams,
(2nd ed., Chapel Hill, 1987); Henry Adams, History of the United States of America in the
Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1986), 100, 1239.
3
To Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799, in TJW, 1058; Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson:
Writings (New York, 1984); Adams, History, 117.

1
2 Introduction: Jefferson’s America

of all America in the Declaration of Independence looks very much like a way
of saying that he spoke for America or, even more boldly, that America spoke
through him. If the “sense of America” really did “approve” of Jefferson’s views,
as he once told Washington, he had merely to “acquiesce,” in turn, for the iden-
tification to be complete.4 In any case, he once told French political economist,
Jean Baptiste Say, “I think for America.”5 Historians are sometimes frustrated
by the tendency of Americans to take Jefferson as a kind of proxy for America,
but Jefferson himself was probably the first to do so.6 This book explores the
story that Jefferson told about America and suggests that this narrative shaped
his politics, his statecraft, and, ultimately, his – and our – identification of his
own person with the nation. In short, it envisions Jefferson as the author of an
American nationalism.

Nearly everything Jefferson did in public life (and much obliquely in private) he
justified in the name of the American nation. Yet few historians have explored
the centrality of nation as an organizing principle of Jefferson’s thought, pol-
itics, and statesmanship.7 Jefferson’s nationalism manifested itself in a rhetor-
ical discourse, a political and cultural project, and an evaluative assessment
of American identity and experience as the universal ideal toward which all
nations would one day aspire.8
There is no essential or exclusively authentic Jefferson, and I steer clear
of any attempt to unveil one here. What I do suggest is that scrutinizing him
through the lens of nationalism envisions some coherence to a career that oth-
ers have characterized as a bundle of contradictions. Scholars have gleaned
important insights by looking carefully at the sources of Jefferson’s ideas. But
Jefferson was not the defender of a preexisting Lockean or a classical repub-
lican tradition. These are scholarly paradigms – created to serve contempo-
rary historiographical needs – that Jefferson might not have recognized as
worth distinguishing in the way scholars have so carefully done.9 Jefferson’s
thought was no doubt molded by his education and studies but was also
crucially forged in the fires of experience and necessity. What if, instead of
beginning with Jefferson’s commitment to a tradition of thought, we begin
with Jefferson’s assumptions about national identity and try to understand
the implications of those assumptions for his politics and statecraft? In other

4
See TJ to Washington, September 9, 1792, in TJW, 996.
5
TJ to Say, February 1, 1804, in TJW, 1144.
6
See the reflections in Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, “American Synecdoche: Thomas Jefferson
as Image, Icon, Character, Self,” in AHR, 103 (February 1998), 125–136.
7
The major exception is Peter S. Onuf in Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American
Nationhood (Charlottesville, 2000) and The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, 2007).
8
See Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis, 1997), 6.
9
See Daniel Rogers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” in JAH, 79 (June 1998),
11–38; Alan Gibson, Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions (Lawrence, 2007),
130–164.
Introduction: Jefferson’s America 3

words, what if we begin with Jefferson’s conception of the “good people”

whom he believed constituted the American nation in 1776, and with the
stories he told about them?10
Nationhood was never a dispensable element in Jefferson’s thought, never
merely a means to an end. My emphasis on the significance of nationhood
does not exclude the centrality of individual natural rights or federalism in his
thought. To the contrary, Jefferson always imagined that when the American
nation was truest to its character and purpose, individual rights and the deep-
est interests of its various communities would be fulfilled. Jefferson rarely had
to prioritize rights or federalism over nationhood precisely because his highest
universal principles were manifested, in historical time, in a particular nation,
the only one on earth explicitly committed to them.
Jefferson’s commitments to state, nation, and world overlapped. To the
degree that scholars (or partisans) have emphasized one of these to the exclu-
sion of others – Jefferson’s Virginia provincialism, for example, over his enlight-
enment cosmopolitanism; his commitment to states’ rights over his expansion
of national power; his lifelong effort to enlarge the capabilities of individuals
over his sense that such individuals were fully liberated only as members of
something larger than the self – they have missed something crucial about the
complexity of his thought.
Jefferson came of age – and grew old – among the Virginia gentry, and he
remained throughout his long public career in national government a member
of the planter class.11 This fact, to be sure, informed his deepest values, but it
did not limit (or exhaust) them. Likewise, his membership in the trans-Atlantic
“republic of letters” was a fundamental aspect of his self-understanding, but
he typically described in capacious or universal language characteristics he
believed to be uniquely American. Nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and pro-
vincialism are not mutually exclusive, but are of necessity bound up with one
another. Cosmopolitanism can be assimilated by provincial culture, national-
ism is generally experienced locally, and cosmopolitan values can shape provin-
cial perspectives. The tired and generally unexamined assertion that Jefferson
meant Virginia when he said “my country,” for example, is not only empiri-
cally false – Jefferson’s “country” could mean Virginia, America, or Albemarle
County, depending on the context – but is also analytically useless, telling us
little about the way Jefferson’s deepest values were an inseparable amalgam-
ation of the cosmopolitan, nationalist, and provincial.
In this book, I make two broad suggestions that may appear to be in ten-
sion. First, I describe Jefferson as an American nationalist. American historians

10
See “Original Rough Draught,” in PTJ, 1:427.
11
For two treatments that emphasize this aspect of Jefferson’s public life, see, Herbert E. Sloan,
Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York, 1995) and
Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler, “I Tremble for My Country”: Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia
Gentry (Gainesville, FL, 2006).
4 Introduction: Jefferson’s America

have been reluctant to do this because they tend to juxtapose Hamilton’s fiscal-
military state with Jefferson’s federalism. Now, to the extent that Jefferson
understood the indispensability of a central state (and served in its offices for
decades), he was a nationalist in this traditional sense, yes, and one of the aims
of this book is, in fact, to recover this aspect of Jefferson’s politics.12 But when
we drop the equation of nationalism with attachment to a particular form of
the state, and focus instead on the claims Jefferson made about the nation,
we can begin to see the multifarious nature of his nationalism.13 If nations
are the “imagined communities” that Benedict Anderson has suggested, then
it might be fruitful to think of nationalism as the process of imagining.14 And,
indeed, Jefferson’s imagining is a central subject of this book. If all nationalisms
assume a collective homogeneity that renders internal differences superficial
and external ones endemic and profound, Jefferson’s was no exception.15 He
imagined a national unity deeply rooted in affection and in what he considered
a peculiarly American set of characteristics: unified history, general prosperity,
republican “spirit,” and domestic happiness. Jefferson was, if not the first, then

12
Also see the important insights in Colin Bonwick, “Jefferson as Nationalist,” in Gary L.
McDowell, Sharon L. Noble, eds., Reason and Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy of
Liberty (Lanham, MD, 1997), 149–168.
13
Nationalism is less an “identification with the state than loyalty to the nation” (Walker Connor,
“A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group is a . . .,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 1
[October 1978], 383; emphasis added). Among a multitude of studies, I have found particularly
helpful two books by Craig Calhoun and two review essays by Lloyd Kramer. See Calhoun,
Nationalism (Minneapolis, 1997) and Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan
Dream (London and New York, 2007); Kramer, “Historical Narratives and the Meaning of
Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 58 (1997), 525–545, and “Nations as Texts:
Literary Theory and the History of Nationalism,” in The Maryland Historian, 24 (1993),
71–82. I also gratefully acknowledge my debt to David Potter’s classic essay, “The Historian’s
Use of Nationalism, and Vice Versa,” in AHR, 67 (July 1962), 924–950, and to Peter Onuf,
“Federalism, Republicanism, and the Origins of American Sectionalism,” in Peter Onuf, Edward
L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and Stephen Nissenbaum, All Over the Map: Rethinking
American Regions (Baltimore and London, 1996), 11–37; 107–117. Also see the lucid introduc-
tion to the literature in Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South,
1848–1865 (New York, 2011), esp. 3–15.
14
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London,
2006). Anderson is quick to point out that “imagined” does not mean “imaginary,” a nice cor-
rective to an assumption all too common in the literature on the “constructed” nature of nations
(6). On the denaturalization of the nation, see Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (Chicago,
1965), 150, 168, and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth,
Reality (Cambridge and New York, 1990), especially 1–15. For a brilliant defense of the viabil-
ity and continued relevance of national history rooted in a vision of nations, not as assumptions
to be taken for granted (naturalized), but as the results of historical processes, see Johann Neem,
“American History in a Global Age,” History and Theory, 50 (February 2011), 41–70, esp.
62–68. I also maintain a particular appreciation of David Hollinger, “The Historian’s Use of the
United States and Vice Versa,” in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global
Age (Berkeley, 2002), 381–395; and, from a different but not ultimately incompatible perspec-
tive, Louis A. Perez, Jr., “We Are the World: Internationalizing the National, Nationalizing the
International,” in JAH, 89 (September 2002), 558–566.
15
See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 7.
Introduction: Jefferson’s America 5

certainly the most prolific and articulate early exponent of a kind of American
exceptionalism.
If my first contention dislodges nation (and nationalism) from an exclusive
association with the state, my second turns our attention back to the state,
though this time, I hope, with new eyes. Jefferson’s conception of the state was
both deeply intertwined with his nationalism and more complex and profound
than a simple preference for limited government. Many of the most common
spurious quotations attributed to Jefferson emphasize his hostility to state
power, and many of Jefferson’s actual phrases have been decontextualized and
used for purposes he would not recognize as his own.16 Thoreau, not Jefferson,
asserted “that government is best which governs least,” and Gerald Ford, not
Jefferson, first warned Americans (in 1974) that “a government big enough to
give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you
everything you have.”17 Misattribution of this sort is understandable because
Jefferson did value limits on government power, and he eyed the state with
an ambivalence rooted in traditional republican concerns about corruption:
“Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence,” he wrote.18
The point here is emphatically not to trade proof texts (we could certainly find
genuine Jefferson quotes that approximate the spurious ones and others that
undermine them, but that would do little to clarify matters) or to encourage a
snide contempt for the public (hardly a Jeffersonian occupation, as we will see).
But it is incumbent on the historian to seek to understand words in the con-
text in which they were uttered. Ford’s concern, for example, could not have
been Jefferson’s, precisely, rooted as it was in a critique of a twentieth-century
welfare state that Jefferson could never have imagined. Jefferson can be neither
a social democrat, a New Deal liberal, or a libertarian (or a Maoist, for that
­matter),19 because he lived in a world that was not animated by the specific
issues and institutions that gave rise to those later political ideologies. Indeed,
one of my intentions is to recover the Jefferson of history from exclusive claims
made by any twentieth-century political ideology. Jefferson’s fear of consolida-
tion and abuse of power was rooted in his democratic nationalism, and under-
standing this renders Jefferson’s approach to government less sphinx-like and
more coherent, if not always perfectly consistent or free from the gyrations of
pragmatic flexibility that bewilder the ideologically rigid. What Jefferson feared
about consolidation was its threat to disconnect the state from the only thing

16
See the running list of lines misattributed to Jefferson compiled by the research staff at
Monticello: http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/spurious-quotations, accessed August 13,
2011.
17
Ford, Address to Joint Session of Congress, August 12, 1974. Text at John T. Woolley and
Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, Santa Barbara, CA: http://www.presidency.
ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=4694, accessed June 11, 2010.
18
Draft of the Kentucky Resolutions, October 1798, in TJW, 454.
19
See Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution,
1785–1800 (Chicago, 1996), 150; Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas
Jefferson (New York, 1997), 127.
6 Introduction: Jefferson’s America

that could grant it legitimacy, the people. The goal of Jefferson’s federalism,
which diffused power, then, was, perhaps paradoxically, an intimacy between
state and nation rather than an inflexible bulwark against state action.
Because, if “the nation” was, as Jefferson once told George Washington,
“the source of authority with us,” Jefferson also understood that the will of
the nation enabled and required power.20 The state could not rest content with
proper ideology; it had an obligation to enact the nation’s ends. As he once
put it, “governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the
will of the people and execute it.”21 Jefferson understood that threats to liberty
could come from the state, certainly, and from private concentrations of power
as well as distant empires. But the American federal system with its overlap-
ping spheres of authority and separation of powers would limit state violence
against citizens while also mobilizing government power for the fulfillment of
the nation’s purposes. This is why Jefferson could value the Bill of Rights pre-
cisely for setting “further guards to liberty without touching the energy of the
government.”22
Jefferson understood that the state could become powerful in ways that
undermined liberty: He had seen this happen at home and abroad, even though
he could never have anticipated all the resources the modern state has at its
disposal to monitor and organize the most intimate details of the lives of citi-
zens. But Jefferson’s ambivalence became hostility only when the state failed
to embody the will of the nation. By the mid-1790s, Jefferson believed that
the Federalists were willing to take the power of the state as an end in itself
rather than as a facilitator of the nation’s purposes. So his political opposition
was never about rendering government impotent. His end was always what he
believed to be the only proper goal of the republican statesman: alignment of
the state with the will of the nation. This commitment to nation offers a funda-
mental continuity between the politics he pursued in the 1790s and his state-
craft as president. Despite the many apparent twists and turns in his career,
the Ariadne’s thread that follows them all is Jefferson’s belief that government
submission to what he called the “will of the nation” was sine qua non in a
republic.23 This book explores the ways in which that commitment played out
over the various political battles of the era.
Jefferson envisioned a fairly intimate relationship between the state and the
people, rooted in a democratic sensibility alien to the possessive individualism
embraced by classic descriptions of modern American liberalism.24 Jefferson

20
TJ to George Washington, February 4, 1792, in PTJ, 23:100–101.
21
TJ to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, in TJW, 1396, emphasis added. For important and
compelling reflections on the relationship between executive energy and public approbation in
Jefferson’s thought, see Jeremy D. Bailey, Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power (Cambridge,
2007).
22
TJ to John Paul Jones, March 23, 1789, in PTJ, 14:689.
23
“Notes on the Legitimacy of Government,” December 30 1792, in PTJ, 24: 802.
24
For recent efforts to render American liberalism historically less individualistic and more demo-
cratic, see Adam-Max Tuchinsky, “‘The Bourgeoisie Will Fall and Fall Forever’: The New-York
Introduction: Jefferson’s America 7

never defended a radical individualism or imagined that democracy was pos-

sible in the absence of certain social conditions that made it viable. Without
economic independence, education and access to information, and maximum
popular participation in government, democracy would add up to nothing
other than what all political thought to his day said it would: mob rule. In
other words, democratic procedure was important to him, but it could never be
efficacious in the absence of a substantive democratic culture – a culture that
he believed existed uniquely in America.
I make no definitive claims here about American nationality, as distinct from
Jefferson’s assertions about it. In this sense, then, this study is both less and
more than we typically get in studies of Jefferson. This is not a biography of
Jefferson, nor is it an exhaustive history of his political thought, his statecraft,
or his political career and achievements, much less an exploration of his per-
sonal life, though all of these are crucial to its theme. Neither do I tell the story
of the nation itself (or even assume its unqualified existence) but, rather, iden-
tify and analyze the story Jefferson told about it. In doing so, I claim Jefferson
as a progenitor of American nationalism, and I make suggestions about how his
conception of the nation shaped his politics and statecraft. My goal is neither
to find a definition for the nation nor to insist that Jefferson conforms to some
predetermined theory of the nation, though many of those theories inform this
work (and in crucial ways make it possible). Rather, I explore the process by
which Jefferson himself imagined the nation and developed the claims he made
on its behalf.
Because Jefferson believed that the nation was constituted by popular
embrace of its existence and purpose, and that no state could be legitimate
without embodying the people’s will and aspirations, he never imagined that
a nation could be understood entirely through a study of its intellectual elite.
The people themselves (as several recent studies have demonstrated) created a
national identity through their practices of nationhood and citizenship (includ-
ing, but not limited to, participation in parades and national celebrations,
absorption of civic texts, erection of memorials, voting, petitioning, writing,
and imagining). Jefferson would be the first to – in fact was the first to – describe
American nationhood as an embodiment of popular aspirations.25
But Jefferson’s “American story” is worth thinking through if only because,
like all discourse, it is an “event” in its own right, a “driving force . . . of

Tribune, the 1848 French Revolution, and American Social Democratic Discourse,” in JAH, 92
(September 2005), 470–497; James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford, 1998),
esp. 21–37; and Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America,”
Reviews in American History 29.3 (2001), 460–476.
25
Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American
Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Len Travers, Celebrating the
Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, 1997);
David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism,
1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Francois Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s
Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York, 2006).
8 Introduction: Jefferson’s America

history, and not merely [a] representation.”26 Arguments and assertions,

David Hollinger reminds us, “are social acts” and, therefore, legitimate
“objects of historical study.”27 If, like all national discourses, Jefferson’s was
congratulatory and often self-serving, ignoring, or papering over, the mul-
tiple contradictory realities and experiences that failed to align with it (or
which might form the basis for an alternate narrative), such was, to some
degree, the basis of its popular appeal.28 The significance of Jefferson’s nar-
rative rests, in part, on its historical capacity to persuade large numbers of
Americans (including historians), whose assent thereby constituted certain
social realities in the early Republic and ultimately shaped the meaning of
the nation for many.29
Jefferson also understood, as Thomas Bender put it, that “the nation cannot
be its own context” but owes its existence to “a framework larger than itself.”30
From the beginning, Jefferson’s assertions of American sovereignty assumed a
“candid world” and a global system of states and national experiences and his-
tories against which to define America’s own. So the international or interstate
system defined and legitimized the nation even as it threatened its existence.
Jefferson’s national project was no mere exercise in political theory, and
this exploration of his practices of nationalism remains separate from any
discussion of whether Jefferson was a successful statesman. The sometimes
crooked timbers of Jefferson’s thought cannot be straightened without dis-
torting the historical record. Though I make a case for the essential coher-
ence of Jefferson’s nationalism, I do not suggest that it remained unchanged
or consistent throughout his life. We will witness plenty of contradictions and
paradoxes – as we might very well expect of any pragmatic nationalism. The
historian’s task, it seems to me, is to describe, explain, and interrogate claims,
not to force clarity on what is inherently irreconcilable. I hope to describe
Jefferson’s thought without necessarily embracing his as an absolutely trust-
worthy depiction of contemporary events (particularly when it comes to his
assessment of Federalist motives and ideals). So, the book is not a defense
or exoneration of Jefferson any more than it is an attack on him. Perhaps it
should go without saying that what follows is not by any means the “whole
truth” about Jefferson – everything we need to know. But if it is one truth

26
Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought
(Cambridge, MA, 1993), xiii.
27
David Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas
(Bloomington, 1985), x.
28
For explorations of this theme, see Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York,
1990), esp. 1–7, and the succinct statement in Jack P. Greene, “Empire and Identity from the
Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution,” in P.J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of
the British Empire, 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 208.
29
Fabián Alejandro Campagne, Homo Catholicus. Homo Superstitiosus. El discurso antisupersti-
cioso en la España de los siglos XV a XVIII (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2002), 21–25. I am
grateful to Andrew Keitt for translating these pages and sharing them with me.
30
Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006), 7.
Introduction: Jefferson’s America 9

about him – and I believe it is – we will need to accommodate the other stories
we tell about Jefferson to it.
In the chapters that follow, Jefferson will appear as the historian, the sociol-
ogist, the ethnographer, and the political theorist of America, as well as the
most successful practitioner of its politics and its most enthusiastic champion.
Chapter 1 describes Jefferson’s narrative of American nationhood as it first
emerged in his revolutionary writing in the 1770s. Jefferson’s “American story”
assumed and asserted the existence of a people, described the character of that
people, and projected this people into nation-time past and future, as well as
the obvious present.31 I argue that the Declaration of Independence made cul-
tural and historical claims about American character and identity even as it
asserted American sovereignty in a world of states, or, rather that these two
projects were intimately connected; the political claims could be legitimate, by
the Declaration’s logic, only if the cultural and historical ones were true. The
legitimacy of the statehood project, Jefferson implied, rested on the existence
of a people.
The second through fourth chapters explore some of the more complex and
particularistic claims Jefferson made about the character of this American peo-
ple. Chapter 2 explores Jefferson’s description of American domestic life as a
universal standard achieved fully only in the United States. Chapter 3 follows
out this analysis by unpacking Jefferson’s further elaboration of the American
“spirit” and character that he believed made democratic politics possible in the
United States and rendered European political theory inapplicable to its expe-
rience.32 Chapter 4 examines the intimate relationship Jefferson envisioned
between the public and the state, between citizens and republican leadership, a
relationship that rendered Americans remarkably free but that also, somewhat
paradoxically, sharply circumscribed the boundaries of the public. In this chap-
ter, I also suggest that the democratic Jefferson we celebrate today is insepara-
ble from the Jefferson who temporized on slavery, excluded African Americans
from the national public, and included Indians on only the most rigidly assim-
ilationist terms. Jefferson’s nation, like all nations, gained coherence from its
“others,” abroad and at home, so that the same nationalism that welcomed
participation among citizens also found it imperative to close off paths to citi-
zenship for those not easily assimilated.
Chapter 5 explores the ramifications of all of these claims and assumptions
about America for Jefferson’s politics, or, rather, it suggests that Jefferson’s
politics in the 1790s might best be understood in light of his nationalism.
Federalists, Jefferson came to believe, did not share his understanding of the
ways in which the American experience had created a public uniquely suited

31
See Stefan Berger, “The Power of National Pasts: Writing National History in Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century Europe,” in Berger, ed., Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective (New
York, 2007), 36.
32
On national character as causally sufficient explanation for behavior, see Joep Leerssen, “The
Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey,” Poetics Today, 21 (Summer 2000),
267–292, esp. 272.
10 Introduction: Jefferson’s America

for democratic politics or the ways in which this experience could be indef-
initely reinforced by a close connection between the public and the state.
Eventually, he came to read the Federalist agenda as a counterrevolutionary
and ultimately un-American effort to administer the national state according
to its own rationale, disconnected except in the most superficial of ways to
the will of the nation. His political opposition, I argue, was, at heart, a project
designed to realign the state with the only thing that rendered it legitimate: the
nation. Reading Jefferson’s political project through the lens of nationhood, I
suggest here, might contribute to new insights into his presidency, rendering his
expansion of executive authority and aggressive uses of national power less a
contradiction than a fulfillment of his opposition in the 1790s. Chapter 6 reads
the Kentucky Resolutions as an episode in this larger project of reconnecting
state and nation, reflects on the problem of coercion in his theory of union, and
considers the inextricability of Jefferson’s federalism from his nationalism.
While the body of the book strives to describe Jefferson’s program as histori-
cally specific, unassimilable precisely to any of our own political ideologies, the
Epilogue faces the reality that Jefferson always slips the bounds of historicism
because he remains an icon of our public culture. What I hope to suggest here is
that the continuing national project of renewing civic life and national purpose
operates largely in the broad terms Jefferson laid out for the continuation of
the national community. Insofar as the nation continues to link itself with that
tradition, it remains Jefferson’s America, even as its scale, scope, and structure
have been transformed out of all recognition from the America Jefferson him-
self knew. Jefferson may have felt little sense of debt or obligation to the past,
because he believed his generation had made the world anew. But he remained
concerned that future generations maintain a sense of connection with that
revolutionary and constitutive moment. Whenever we reverence the “found-
ers,” Jefferson included, as “our” ancestors, we are in some fundamental sense
affirming Jefferson’s original vision of a national community moving through
time. In a sense, then, the Epilogue concedes the defeat of history by tradition
and collective memory. And this takes us back to the founders’ conception of
history as a moral exercise rather than an effort to simply reconstruct the past
as it really was.
Reading Jefferson as an American nationalist, then, may offer a way of
envisioning him anew, of questioning our shibboleths not only about him but
also about ourselves. The world may not need another book about Thomas
Jefferson, but I hope that this one at least suggests that wrestling with Jefferson
remains a fruitful exercise for both the scholar and the citizen.
1

American Story

Few people have extended their enquiries after the foundation of any of their
rights, beyond a charter from the crown. There are others who think when they
have got back to old Magna Charta, that they are at the beginning of all things.
They imagine themselves on the borders of Chaos (and so indeed in some respects
they are) and see creation rising out of the unformed mass, or from nothing. . . .
But liberty was better understood, and more fully enjoyed by our ancestors,
before the coming in of the first Norman Tyrants.
James Otis, 17641

I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our
forefathers, as Israel of old, from their native land, and planted them in a country
flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy
with his providence, and our riper years with his wisdom and power.
Thomas Jefferson, 18052

Jefferson began what would prove his most enduring piece of writing with
distinctions between peoples. It was a theme that would never be far from his
thought and writing. “One people” (or as he put it in his initial draft, “a peo-
ple”) was deciding to sever its previous connection with another.3 Americans
would climb “the road to glory & happiness . . . in a separate state.”4 “By our

1
“The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved” (1764), in Merrill Jensen, Tracts of the
American Revolution (Indianapolis, 1966), 20–21.
2
Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805, in TJW 523.
3
See Peter S. Onuf, “A Declaration of Independence for Diplomatic Historians,” Diplomatic
History 22 (1998), 71–83, to the insights of which this chapter is deeply indebted. Also see J.G.A.
Pocock, “America’s Foundations, Foundationalisms, and Fundamentalisms,” Orbis (Winter
2004), 37–44, at 39; and Pocock, “States, Republics, and Empires: The American Founding
in Early Modern Perspective,” in Terence Ball, ed., Conceptual Change and the Constitution
(Lawrence, KS, 1988), 55–77.
4
Jefferson’s “original rough draught” of the Declaration, in PTJ 1:427. In a later fragment,
Jefferson changed the phrase to “apart from them.” See “Fragment of the Composition Draft of
the Declaration of Independence,” in ibid., 421. Congress excised both.

11
12 Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood

separation from Great-Britain,” he explained later, “British subjects became

aliens” in America.”5 So the crisis that led to Revolution created two peoples,
and there could be “no middle character” between them: “Natural subjects” of
the crown could not be “American citizens” who had somehow become “aliens”
to the English, free citizens of “a nation now separated from them.”6 In this
reading, the Declaration of Independence was the genesis of American nation-
hood as well as the “fundamental act of union of these states,” as Jefferson
later characterized it.7 The real question, Jefferson and other supporters of
independence in the Congress argued, had not been whether a Declaration
would “make ourselves what we are not; but whether we should declare a
fact which already exists.” The Declaration would simply describe “an existent
truth.”8 The Declaration’s logic – and Jefferson’s later explanation that with
that document he was simply expressing “the American mind” – assumed the
existence of the nation already.9 But two peoples cannot become two over-
night, and the burden of much of Jefferson’s most important writing from
the Revolutionary era fell to explaining the origins and describing the unique
character of the American people, a people with a past and a future as well
as a present. For this explanation, Jefferson first turned to history. Americans,
he argued, were connected through a common experience of expatriation and
of alienation from Britain. If there was “a people” in North America, as the
Declaration assumed, his 1774 pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of
British America, described its history. If the Declaration was a birth, a “rupture
in time,” the Summary View described the long gestation of a nation. In the
Summary View, Jefferson first began to spin what he there called “American
story.”10 In becoming one of the first chroniclers of the nation’s past, Jefferson
became its first postcolonial theorist of the nation’s present and projector of its
indefinite future.

A People in the Empire

The most compelling work written on the “first” British Empire suggests at
least three conclusions: first, that the practice of empire was federal whatever
it purported to be in theory; second, that intercolonial relations were tenu-
ous at best and that whatever gave Britons in North America any semblance
of unity was precisely their shared embrace of British identity; third, that the
craving of the eighteenth-century colonial elite to emulate British cultural

5
Notes, 155.
6
Notes on British and American Alienage [1783], in PTJ, 6:433.
7
Minutes of the Board of Visitors, University of Virginia, 1822–1825, March 4, 1825, in TJW,
479.
8
Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes of Proceedings in the Continental Congress” [June 7 to August 1,
1776], in PTJ, 1:311.
9
David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, 2007), 17.
10
See the reflections in Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism (New York, 1991, rev. ed.), ch. 11.
American Story 13

standards – to measure up – was consistently thwarted by the knowledge of

its provincial ­status vis-à-vis the real British aristocracy, a knowledge continu-
ally reinforced by traffic patterns of administration. Unlike Spanish Americans,
British Americans had a good deal of experience running local affairs. But as
among the former, it was only the extremely rare American Creole who could
even imagine acquiring enough cultural and economic capital to ever parlay
that into some kind of authoritative political power in the metropolis.11 When
American elites did show up in England, they were typically awestruck.12 It
speaks worlds that the artificially unifying term American emerged out of
Britain as a nomenclature of difference.13
It was their very status as provincials that nevertheless freed Americans to
make remarkable leaps in political creativity.14 Moreover, British efforts to
overadminister the colonies after the 1760s, as well as the print culture that
reinforced America’s distinct status as an outpost to be administered, grad-
ually set into place a “grammar” of imagining that would awaken a kind of
national consciousness in Americans vis-à-vis the “imperial” center. Such imag-
ining rhetorically rendered the diverse “American” pasts a common heritage
even as colonial political claims to statehood (and unity) were shockingly new.
In other words, British practice of making “others” of American provincials
helped wear a footpath toward American nationalism.15
Colonists who opposed the implementation of new British policies in the
1760s and 1770s – Jefferson included – rooted their initial resistance in their
Britishness but ended, of necessity, making claims as Americans.16 If their ini-
tial opposition was rooted in collective historical experiences they believed
they shared with all Britons, their Revolution very quickly demanded that

11
On the aspirations of one such rarity, see Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin
Franklin (New York, 2004), esp. ch. 2.
12
See a description of John Adams’s (now an official representative of the United States) encoun-
ter with George III in Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “‘If Others Will Not Be Active, I Must
Drive’: George III and the American Revolution,” Early American Studies (Spring 2004), 1–46,
at 1–4. Naturally, colonial self-loathing could manifest itself just as loudly as resentment or dis-
gust at the luxurious self-indulgence of the British court. See H. Trevor Colbourn and Richard
Peters, “A Pennsylvania Farmer at the Court of King George: John Dickinson’s London Letters,
1754–1756,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 86 (July 1962), 241–286
and (October 1962), 417–453. See also the complicated response(s) of Benjamin Franklin
detailed in Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin.
13
P.J. Marshall, “A Nation Defined by Empire, 1755–1776,” in Alexander Grant and Keith J.
Stringer, eds., Uniting the Kingdom?: The Making of British History (London and New York,
1995), 220.
14
Bernard Bailyn, “Politics and the Creative Imagination,” in To Begin the World Anew: The
Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York, 2003), 3–36.
15
My debt to Anderson, Imagined Communities, should be obvious here and throughout this
chapter.
16
Anthony Pagden and Nicholas Canny, “Afterword: From Identity to Independence,” in Canny
and Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton, 1987), 277–
278. Also see Jack P. Greene, “Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados as a Case
Study,” in ibid., 214.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 CHAPTER XXVIII.
DEATH OF OMAR.

A.H. XXIII. A.D. 644.

It was now the eleventh year of Omar’s

Caliphate, and though fifty-five years of Omar performs pilgrimage;
age (according to others over sixty) he was end of a.h. XXIII. October,
a.d. 644.
full of vigour and vigilant in the discharge
of the vast responsibilities that devolved upon him.[418] In the last
month of the twenty-third year of the Hegira, he journeyed, as was
his wont, to Mecca; and taking on this occasion the Widows of
Mahomet in his suite, performed with them the rites of the annual
Pilgrimage. He had returned but a few days to Medîna, when his
reign came to a tragical and untimely end.
A Persian slave, Feroze, called more
familiarly Abu Lulû, had been brought by Abu Lulû, a Persian slave,
Moghîra from Irâc. Carried off a prisoner in promises to make a windmill.
his youth by the Romans, he had early embraced Christianity; and
now, captured from them by the Moslems, his fate was to endure a
second captivity as Moghîra’s slave. When the crowd of prisoners
was marched into Medîna from the battle of Nehâvend (which is said
to have been his birthplace) he gave vent to his grief; the sight
opened springs of tenderness long pent up, and stroking the heads
of the little ones, he exclaimed: ‘Verily, Omar hath consumed my
bowels!’ He practised the trade of a carpenter; and Moghîra, as his
owner, shared the profit. Meeting Omar in the market-place,[419] he
cried out, ‘Commander of the Faithful! right me of my wrong, for
verily Moghîra hath assessed me heavily.’ ‘At how much?’ asked the
Caliph. ‘At two dirhems a day.’ ‘And what is thy trade?’ ‘A carpenter,
designer, and worker in iron.’ ‘It is not much,’ replied Omar, ‘for a
clever artificer like thee. I am told that thou couldst make for me a
mill driven by the wind.’ ‘It is true.’ ‘Come then,’ continued the Caliph,
‘and make me such a mill that shall be driven by the wind.’ ‘If
spared,’ said the captive in a surly voice, ‘I will make a mill for thee,
the fame whereof shall reach from the East even to the far West;’
and he went on his way. Omar remarked, as he passed on, the
sullen demeanour of Abu Lulû:—‘That slave,’ he said, ‘spoke
threateningly to me just now.’[420]
Next morning, when the people
assembled in the Great Mosque for the Omar mortally wounded by
Abu Lulû.
early matin prayer, Abu Lulû mingled with
the front rank of the worshippers. Omar entered, and, as was
customary with the Imâm who led the prayers, took his stand in
advance of the congregation, having his back towards them. He had
no sooner called out the first words, Allah Akbar, than Abu Lulû
rushed upon him, and with a sharp blade inflicted six wounds in
different parts of his body. Then he ran wildly about, killing some and
wounding others, and at last stabbed himself to death. Omar, who
had fallen to the ground, was borne into his house, which adjoined
the Mosque, sufficiently composed to desire that Abd al Rahmân
should proceed with the service. When it was ended, Omar
summoned him to his bedside, and signified his intention of
nominating him to the Caliphate. ‘Is this obligatory upon me?’
inquired Abd al Rahmân. ‘Nay, by the Lord!’ said Omar, ‘thou art
free.’ ‘That being so,’ he replied, ‘I never will accept the burden.’[421]
‘Then stanch my wound,’ said the dying Caliph (for life was ebbing
fast through a great gash below the navel), ‘and stay me while I
commit my trust unto a company of men that were faithful unto their
Prophet, and with whom their Prophet was well pleased.’ So he
named together with Abd al Rahmân, other
four, namely Aly, Othmân, Zobeir, and Sád, Omar appoints Electors to
as the chiefest among the Companions of choose successor.
Mahomet, to be the electors of his successor, and called them to his
bedside. When they appeared, he proceeded thus:—‘Wait for your
brother Talha (who was absent for the moment from Medîna) three
days; if he arrive, take him for the sixth; if not, ye are to decide the
matter between you.’ Then, addressing each in turn, he warned them
of the grave responsibility attaching to their office as Electors, and
the danger to the elected one of favouring unduly his own clan and
family. ‘O Aly, if the choice fall upon thee, see that thou exalt not the
Beni Hâshim above their fellows. And thou, Othmân, if thou art
elected, or Sád, beware that thou set not thy kinsmen over the necks
of men. Arise, go forth, deliberate and then decide. Meanwhile
Soheib shall lead the public prayers.’[422] When they had departed,
he called Abu Talha, a warrior of note, to him:[423] ‘Go, stand,’ he
said, ‘before their door, and suffer no man to enter in unto them.’
After a while he proceeded solemnly, addressing those around him:
—‘To him who shall succeed, give it as my dying bequest that he be
kind to the Men of this city, which gave a home to us and to the
Faith; that he make much of their virtues, and pass lightly by their
faults. And bid him treat well the Arab tribes, for verily they are the
backbone of Islam; the tithe that he taketh from them, let him give it
back unto the same for the nourishment of their poor. And the Jews
and Christians, let him faithfully fulfil the covenant of the Prophet with
them.[424] O Lord, I have finished my course. And now to him that
cometh after me I leave the kingdom and the Caliphate firmly
stablished and at peace.’ Then he lay down quietly and rested for a
time.
After a while he bade his son go forth,
and see who it was that had wounded him. Omar desires to be interred
beside the Prophet.
Being told that it was Abu Lulû, he
exclaimed:—‘Praise be to the Lord that it was not one who had ever
bowed down before Him, even once, in prayer! Now, Abdallah, my
son, go in unto Ayesha, and ask her leave that I be buried in her
chamber by the side of the Prophet, and by the side of Abu Bekr. If
she refuse, then bury me by the other Moslems, in the graveyard of
Backî.[425] And list thee, Abdallah, if they disagree’ (for he too was to
have a voice in the election) ‘then be thou with the majority; or, if the
votes be equal, then choose thou that side on which is Abd al
Rahmân. Now let the people come in.’ Crowds had assembled at the
door; and, permission having been given, they approached to make
obeisance. As they passed in and out, Omar asked whether any
leading man had joined in conspiring against him. ‘The Lord forbid!’
was the loud response of all, in horror at the very word. . For this
burying-ground, see Life of Mahomet, p. 208.
 Among the rest, Aly came forward to
inquire; and as he sat by the bedside, the Omar’s death.
son of Abbâs came up. Omar, who
dreaded the factious spirit of the latter, said: ‘O Ibn Abbâs, art thou
with me in this matter?’ He signified assent, whereupon Omar added
earnestly: ‘See that thou deceive me not, thou and thy fellows.[426]
Now, Abdallah, my son, raise up my head from the pillow, and then
lay it gently on the ground:[427] peradventure the Lord may in mercy
take me thus, this night, for I fear the horrors of the rising sun.’ A
physician gave him to drink of date-water; but it oozed through the
wound unchanged; and so also with a draught of milk. Which when
the physician saw, he said: ‘I perceive that the wound is mortal:
make now thy testament, O Commander of the Faithful.’ ‘That,’ said
Omar, ‘have I done already.’ As he lay, his head resting on the
bosom of his son, he recited this couplet:—
It had gone hard with my soul, if I had not been a Moslem;
But verily all the appointed prayers have I observed, and fasted.

And so, in a low voice, he kept Nov. 3, a.d. 644.

repeating the name of the Lord, and the
short Moslem creed, until his spirit passed away. It was the 26th of
Dzul Hijj, the 23rd year of the Hegira. He had reigned for the space
of ten years and a half.[428]
So died Omar, next to the Prophet the
greatest in the of Islam; for it was all within Achievements of his
these ten years that, by his wisdom, Calphate.
patience, and vigour, the dominion was achieved over Syria, Egypt,
and Persia, which Islam has ever since maintained. Abu Bekr beat
down the apostate tribes; but at his death the armies of Islam had
but just crossed the Syrian frontier. Omar began his reign the master
only of Arabia. He died the Caliph of an empire embracing Persia,
Egypt, and some of the fairest provinces of the Byzantine throne. Yet
throughout this marvellous fortune he never lost the equipoise of a
wise and sober judgment, nor exalted himself above the frugal and
familiar style of the Arab Chief. ‘Where is the Caliph?’ would the
visitor from distant provinces inquire, as he looked around the court
of the Great Mosque; and all the while the monarch sat in homely
guise before him.
The features of Omar’s life it requires
but few lines to sketch. Simplicity and duty Character of Omar.
were his guiding principles. Impartiality and
devotion characterised the discharge of his great office; and the
responsibility so weighed upon him that at times he would exclaim,
‘O that my mother had not borne me; would that I had been this stalk
of grass instead!’ Of a fiery and impatient temper, he was noted in
his youth, and even during the later days of the Prophet’s life, as the
stern advocate of vengeance. Ever ready to unsheathe the sword, it
was he who, after the battle of Bedr, advised that the prisoners
should all be put to death. But age, as well as weight of office, had
mellowed the asperity of his nature.[429] His sense of justice was
strong. And excepting the treatment of Khâlid, whom he pursued
with an ungenerous resentment, no act of tyranny or injustice is
recorded against him; and even in this matter his enmity took its rise
in Khâlid’s unscrupulous treatment of a fallen foe. The choice of his
captains and governors was free from favouritism; and (the
appointment of Moghîra and Ammâr excepted) singularly fortunate.
The different tribes and bodies in the empire, representing interests
the most diverse, reposed in his integrity the utmost confidence, and
his strong arm maintained the discipline of law and empire. A certain
weakness is discernible in his change of governors at the factious
seats of Bussorah and Kûfa. But even so, the conflicting claims of
Bedouin and Coreish were kept by him in check, and never dared to
disturb Islam till he had passed away. The more distinguished of the
Companions he kept around him at Medîna, partly, no doubt, to
strengthen his counsels, and partly (as he would say) from
unwillingness to lower their dignity by placing them in an office
subordinate to himself.[430] Whip in hand, he perambulated the
streets and markets of Medîna, ready to punish the offenders on the
spot; and it became a proverb,—‘Omar’s whip is more terrible than
another’s sword.’ But with all this he was tender-hearted, and
numberless acts of kindness are recorded, such as relieving the
wants of the widow and the fatherless.[431]
 Omar was the first who assumed the
title Ameer al Momenîn, or ‘Commander of The first called Commander
the Faithful.’ Caliph (Successor) of the of the Faithful.
Prophet of the Lord, was, he said, ‘too long and cumbersome a
name, while the other was easier and more fit for common use.’
According to his desire, Omar was
buried side by side with the Prophet and Burial of Omar.
Abu Bekr, in the chamber of Ayesha.
Soheib, as presiding over the public prayers, performed the funeral
service, and the five Electors, with Abdallah, the Caliph’s son,
lowered the body into its last resting-place.
The Moslem annalist may well sigh as
he bids farewell to the strong and single- Faction and schism in
minded Caliph; and enters on the troubled prospect.
sea of self-seeking faction, strife, and schism, which opens with the
Caliphate of his successor.
 CHAPTER XXIX.
ELECTION OF OTHMAN.

DZUL HIJJ, A.H. XXIII.—MOHARRAM, A.H. XXIX.

NOVEMBER, A.D. 644.

What arrangement Omar might have

made for a successor, had his end come The Electors.
less suddenly upon him, it is perhaps
unnecessary to inquire. But some more definite choice he would, in
all probability, have signified. We know that the perils of disunion
hung heavily on his mind. The unbridled arrogance of the numerous
powerful tribes settled in Kûfa and Bussorah, flushed with the glory
and the spoils of war, was already felt a danger; while family rivalries
amongst the Coreish themselves were beginning to weaken their
hold over the people which had hitherto been absolute. So much is
plain, that (Abd al Rahmân perhaps excepted) Omar saw none
amongst them endowed with sufficient power and influence, after his
death, to hold the reins of government. There was none, at least, so
prominent as to take the acknowledged lead. Again, the mode of
nomination or election proper to Islam, was as yet all uncertain. Abu
Bekr had on his death-bed named Omar his successor; but the
higher precedent of Mahomet, who appointed no one to take his
place, but simply named Abu Bekr, when he fell sick, to lead the
prayers, was doubtful. Had Abu Obeida been yet alive, Omar
declared that he would have chosen him; and the succession now
offered to Abd al Rahmân was (as we have seen) declined. Weak
and faint from the assassin’s dagger, the emergency came upon the
dying Caliph altogether unprepared to meet it. So, relieving himself
of the responsibility, he fell upon the expedient of nominating the six
chiefest Companions, on one or other of whom he knew that the
choice must needs fall, to be the Electors of a successor from
amongst themselves. These were Abd al Rahmân, Othmân, Aly,
Sád, Zobeir, and Talha. A seventh was added in the person of his
son Abdallah, who, himself excluded from election,[432] was (in case
the conclave were divided) to have the casting vote; and this his
father desired him to give on whichever side Abd al Rahmân might
be. Talha was absent, and did not return until the election had been
made.
Omar hoped, no doubt, that the
Successor thus chosen would be strong in Character of the Electors.
the support of his Electors. But he had not
calculated on the frailty of human nature; and selfish ends proved
more powerful than loyalty to Islam. Abd al Rahmân was the only
real patriot amongst them. Talha, Zobeir, and Sád, not yet beyond
the age of fifty, had none of them any special reason to aspire to the
Caliphate. They were all warriors of renown. Zobeir was closely
related to the Prophet. Sád was the nephew of Mahomet’s mother;
but his recall from Kûfa (although Omar had declared it to involve no
discredit) could not but in some measure tarnish the fame of the
conqueror of Medâin. Aly, a few years younger, had by far the
strongest claims of kinship (whatever these might be); for he was at
once the son of Mahomet’s uncle, the widowed husband of Fâtima,
and the father of the Prophet’s only surviving grandsons. He had
hitherto, from his inactive temperament, remained passive at the
Caliph’s court; but, possessed of a quick and high intelligence, he
had ever held a distinguished place in the counsels of Omar. The
time was now come, when, in the absence of any leading competitor,
his claims could no longer fail to be recognised by those around him;
or, without want of spirit, to be asserted by himself. Othmân was the
only real rival. His years carried weight, for he was now close on
seventy. Handsome and attractive in person and carriage, he gained
the hand of Rockeya, the Prophet’s daughter. She died while the
battle of Bedr was being fought. Shortly after, he married her sister
Omm Kolthûm; and when she, too, died, Mahomet used to say he
loved Othmân so dearly that, if another daughter had remained, he
would have given her also to him. But with all this, his character had
vital defects. Of a close and selfish disposition, his will was soft and
yielding. And of all the competitors, Othmân probably had the least
capacity for dominating the unruly elements of the Moslem empire.
 The Electors, when appointed by Omar,
retired at once to an adjoining chamber, Electors’ conclave. Three
and forthwith fell into such loud and hot days’ fruitless discussion.
discussion, that Abdallah exclaimed, ‘Good heavens! all this tumult,
and my father still alive!’ Omar, overhearing it, desired that they
should wait till his decease, and then again assemble. So after his
death and burial, Micdâd, a veteran citizen appointed by the
deceased Caliph to the duty, gathered the Electors in the treasury
chamber attached to Ayesha’s house, Abu Talha keeping watch at
the door with a guard of fifty men.[433] Omar’s order was that the
choice should not be delayed beyond the third day, so that his
successor might be declared by the fourth at latest; and he signified
the urgency of the business in the empire’s interest, by saying that if
the minority then resisted, they should be beheaded on the spot.
When the Electors came together, each pressed hotly the claim of
his own party, and two days were wasted in unprofitable wrangling.
Abd al Rahmân spent his nights in visiting the leading citizens, and
the governors and chief men from the provinces (who, having come
for the yearly pilgrimage, had not yet departed to their several posts)
and in sounding their views. On the third day, Abu Talha warned the
Electors that he would allow no further delay, and that the decision
must be come to by the following morning. To bring the matter,
therefore, to an issue, Abd al Rahmân offered to forego his own
claim to the Caliphate, if only the rest would abide by his decision.
They all agreed but Aly, who at first was silent. At last Aly said: ‘First
give me thy word that thou wilt not regard kith nor kin, but the right
alone and the people’s weal.’ ‘And I,’ rejoined Abd al Rahmân, ‘ask
thee first to give me thy troth that thou wilt abide by my choice, and
against all dissentients wilt support the same.’ Aly assented, and
thus the matter rested in the hands of Abd al Rahmân.
That night Abd al Rahmân did not close
his eyes. The contest was narrowed Abd al Rahmân acts as
between the houses of Hâshim and Umpire.
Omeyya, in the persons of Aly and Othmân, and their influence with
the electoral body was fairly equal.[434] Abd al Rahmân was closeted
with each of the Electors alone in turn. Zobeir was in favour of Aly;
how Sád voted is not certain. With Aly and Othmân, separately, Abd
al Rahmân was long in secret conference. Each pressed his own
claim; but each also admitted the claim of the other to be the next in
weight to his own. The morning broke upon them thus engaged; and
now the nomination must be made.
The Great Mosque overflowed with
expectant worshippers, who crowded in Othmân elected Caliph.
unusual number to the morning service.
Abd al Rahmân addressed them thus:—‘The people think that the
governors, chiefs, and captains should, without further waiting, return
to their respective posts. Wherefore advise me now in this matter.’
Ammâr, the late governor of Kûfa, said: ‘If it be thy desire that there
be no division in the land, then salute Aly, Caliph!’ and Micdâd
affirmed the same. ‘Nay,’ cried Abu Sarh, ‘if it be thy desire that there
be no division, then salute Othmân!’ and Abu Rabia affirmed the
same. Ammâr turned contemptuously on Abu Sarh; who, repaying
scorn with scorn, said: ‘And pray, Ammâr, how long hast thou been
counsellor to the Moslems? Let the Beni Hâshim and Omeyya speak
for themselves.’ But Ammâr would not be silent, and, continuing to
press the claims of Aly, asked why the government should pass
away from the Prophet’s line. Whereupon one of the Beni Makhzûm
(a Coreishite tribe) cried angrily: ‘Thou passest beyond thy bounds,
O son of Sommeyya; who art thou, thus to counsel the Coreish?’[435]
Sád, seeing that the strife was waxing warm, said to Abd al Rahmân:
‘Finish thy work at once, or the flames of discord will burst forth.’
‘Silence, ye people!’ cried Abd al Rahmân—‘Be quiet, or ye will bring
evil upon yourselves. The determination of this matter resteth with
me.’ So saying, he called Aly to the front, and thus addressed him:
‘Dost thou bind thyself by the covenant of the Lord, to do all
according to the Book of the Lord, the example of the Prophet, and
the precedent of his Successors?’ ‘I hope,’ responded Aly, ‘that I
should do so; I will act according to the best of my knowledge and
ability.’ Then he put the same question to Othmân, who answered
unconditionally,—‘Yea, I will.’ Whereupon, either dissatisfied with
Aly’s hesitating answer, or having already decided in his mind
against him, Abd al Rahmân raised his face toward heaven, and
taking Othmân by the hand, prayed thus aloud:—‘O Lord, do thou
hearken now and bear me witness. Verily the burden that is around
my neck, the same I place around the neck of Othmân.’ So saying,
he saluted him as Caliph, and all the people followed his example.
It was the first day of the new year, the
twenty-fourth of the Hegira. After receiving Othmân’s inaugural address,
3d Moharram, a.h. XXIV.
the homage of the people, a process in Nov. 7, a.d. 644.
which two or three days were occupied,
Othmân ascended the pulpit, and made a brief and modest speech.
[436] ‘The first attempt,’ he said, ‘was always difficult, for he was
unused to speak in public. It would be his duty in the future to
address them, and the Lord would teach him.’
Though Aly, like the rest, took the oath
of allegiance to Othmân, yet his party were Aly swears allegiance.
much displeased, and he himself
upbraided Abd al Rahmân bitterly with the desire to keep the
supreme power out of the Prophet’s house and brotherhood.
‘Beware,’ said Abd al Rahmân, with a prophetic warning: ‘take heed
lest, thus speaking, thou makest not a way against thyself, whereof
thou shalt repent hereafter.’ And so Aly passed out with the words of
Joseph on his lips; ‘Surely patience becometh me. The Lord is my
helper against that which ye devise.’[437] Shortly after, Talha returned
to Medîna. Othmân acquainted him with what had happened. As his
vote would have ruled the majority, Othmân declared that if he
dissented, he was prepared even then to resign the Caliphate. But
on learning that all the people had agreed, Talha also swore
allegiance.
The choice of Abd al Rahmân laid the
seeds of disaster for Islam at large, and for The choice unfortunate for
the Caliphate in particular. It led to Islam; faith.
but made in good

dissensions which for years bathed the

Moslem world in blood, threatened the very existence of the faith,
and to this day divide believers in a hopeless and embittered schism.
But Abd al Rahmân could hardly have anticipated the wanton, weak,
and wavering policy of Othmân which slowly but surely brought such
results about. There is no reason to think that, in discharging his
functions as Umpire, he acted otherwise than loyally and for the
best.[438]
An embarrassing incident followed immediately on the accession
of Othmân. Some one told Obeidallah, son
of the deceased Caliph, that Abu Lulû had Murder of Hormuzân, and
been seen some days before in private affair of Omar’s son.
converse with Hormuzân the Persian prince, and with a Christian
slave belonging to Sád; and that when surprised the three
separated, dropping a poniard such as that with which the assassin
had wounded Omar. Rashly assuming a conspiracy, the infuriated
son rushed with drawn sword to avenge his father’s death, and slew
both the prince and the slave. Sád, incensed at the loss of his slave,
seized Obeidallah, still reeking with his victims’ blood, and carried
him, as the murderer of a believer (for Hormuzân had professed the
Moslem faith) before the Caliph.
A council was called. There was not a tittle of evidence, or
presumption even, against the prince. Aly delivered his opinion that,
according to the law of God, Obeidallah must be put to death, as
having slain a believer without due cause. Others were shocked at
the proposal:—‘But yesterday,’ they said, ‘the Commander of the
Faithful was slain, and to-day thou wilt put his son to death!’ Moved
by the appeal, Othmân assumed the responsibility of naming a
money compensation in lieu of blood, and this he paid himself. Some
feeling was excited, and people said that the Caliph was already
departing from the strict letter of the law. Ziâd ibn Lebîd, a poet of
Medîna, satirised both the murderer and the Caliph who had let him
off, in stinging verse. But he was silenced; the matter dropped, and
there is no reason to think that in the end Othmân’s action was
generally disapproved.[439]
One of the first acts by which Othmân
signalised his accession was to increase Othmân increases stipends.
the stipends of the chief men all round, by
the addition to each of one hundred dirhems. The act, no doubt, was
popular, but it gave promise of extravagance in the new
administration.
 CHAPTER XXX.
CALIPHATE OF OTHMAN. GENERAL REVIEW.

A.H. XXIV.-XXXV. A.D. 645–656.

Having now traced the progress of

Islam to its firm establishment in the world, Dynastic issues of the
I do not propose to pursue the history of its Caliphate.
conquests and further spread, otherwise than in a very brief and
general way; but shall confine what remains of this work chiefly to a
review of the facts bearing on the dynastic issues of the Caliphate.
The reign of Othmân lasted twelve
years. It is usual to say that the first six Causes of Othmân’s
were popular, and the last six the reverse; unpopularity:
that is to say, that, during the latter half, the tide turned, and,
discontent ripening into sedition, the storm burst at length with fatal
force upon the aged Caliph. This is true if we look at the outward
appearance. But in reality the causes of unpopularity were busily at
work from the very beginning. These were twofold: first, antagonism
between the Arab nation at large and the Coreish; secondly, jealousy
between the house of Hâshim, and that of Abd Shems (the
Omeyyads) to which Othmân and Muâvia belonged.
The Arab soldiery, flushed with the
glory and the fruits of victory, were I. Antagonism between Arab
tribes at large and Coreish.
scattered all over the empire. In Syria, they
were held in check by the powerful hand of Muâvia, whose authority
was strengthened by the larger settlement there than elsewhere of
influential citizens from Mecca and Medîna. In every other province,
conscious of their power, the Arab tribes were rapidly getting the bit
between their teeth. Their arrogant and factious spirit found its focus
at Kûfa and Bussorah in both of which cities, indeed, it had already
ominously shown itself during the reign of Omar; for even he had not
been able effectually to curb it there. Impatience of control on the
part of the Arabs was based partly on the spread of Islam having
been due to the prowess of their arms; and partly on the brotherhood
of the faith, in virtue of which all believers, and specially those of
Arab blood, stood on the common ground of civil equality. The
Caliph, it is true, as successor to the Prophet, was absolute,
uncontrolled by any constitutional authority whatever. But even he,
yielding to the sentiment, not only took counsel on all critical
occasions with the leading men around him, but, as a rule, held
himself bound by the popular voice at large, and enjoined the same
upon his lieutenants in the provinces. And so it was that in the recall
of Sád, the arraigning of Abu Mûsa, and other concessions to the
clamour of the citizens of Bussorah and Kûfa, Omar had already set
a baneful lesson to his successor, and given to those constituencies
a foretaste of power which they were not slow to take advantage of.
Thus the turbulent spirit grew from day to day—a spirit of opposition
to all authority, and of impatience in particular of the pretensions of
the Coreish.
The second cause, though less
threatening to Islam, was more insidious, II. Aly and the house of
Hâshim jealous of Othmân
and fraught with greater danger to the and the house of Omeyya.
Caliphate and the person of Othmân
himself. Had the Coreish rallied loyally around the throne, the Arab
factions might have been nipped in the bud. But the weakness of
Othmân, and the partiality with which he favoured his own friends
and relatives, stirred the jealousy of the house of Hâshim, which
began vaunting the claims of Aly and the Prophet’s family, and
depreciating the Omeyyad branch to which the Caliph belonged.
That branch, unfortunately for the Omeyyads, had been the tardiest
to recognise the mission of Mahomet; and the kinsmen on whom
Othmân now lavished his favours had been the most inveterate in
their opposition to it. Every unfavourable expression uttered by the
Prophet during that period of bitter enmity was now raked up against
them, and used to blacken their names, and to cast discredit on a
government which promoted them to power and honour. Thus the
Coreish were divided; rivalry paralysed their influence, and Othmân
lost the support which would otherwise have enabled him to check
the machinations of the Arab malcontents. Still worse, Aly and his
party lent themselves to the disloyal policy of the Bedouin faction,
which was fast sapping the foundations of the Caliphate, and which,
as Aly should have foreseen, would in the end recoil against himself.
[440]

It was not, however, till the later part of

Othmân’s reign that these influences, Factious spirit diverted by
military service.
though early at work, assumed dangerous
prominence. Their retardation was in great measure due to the
military operations, which, busily pursued in all directions by the
Moslem arms, diverted attention from domestic trouble. Campaigns
were annually prosecuted, with more or less vigour, throughout the
twelve years of Othmân’s Caliphate. A very brief outline of them will
suffice.
In Persia, as we have seen, the
Mussulman invasion had resulted hitherto Operations in Persia.
rather in the dispersion of great armies
than in the effectual reduction of the country. Most of the provinces
resented the first imposition of tribute, and rose against their new
masters, one after another, in repeated and sometimes long-
continued rebellion. Expeditions were time after time equipped from
Kûfa and Bussorah to crush these risings, from the Caspian Sea and
the Oxus to the shores of the Indian Ocean, and even as far as
Kabul.[441] It was not till near the close of Othmân’s reign that the
Moslem yoke was firmly settled on the neck of Persia. In the eighth
year of his Caliphate, Yezdegird died; and
thereafter, though in a desultory and a.h. XXXI. a.d. 652.
sporadic fashion opposition might still
survive, anything like national or dynastic antagonism was at an end.
Success, indeed, did not invariably attend the Moslem arms. The
progress, on the whole, was steadily forward; but there were
reverses, and these sometimes of a serious type. In the year a.h. 32,
the Turks on the western shore of the Caspian had an advantage, in
which the Arab leaders and a great body of the veterans were slain.
To retrieve the disaster, Othmân ordered levies from Syria to cross
Mesopotamia and reinforce the Kûfan army. Bad blood bred between
the two; the Syrians refused to serve under the captain of the rival
body; and an altercation ensued which nearly led to bloodshed. This,
adds the historian, was the first symptom of the breach between the
Kûfans and the men of Syria, which subsequently broke out into
prolonged hostilities. About the same time, a whole army was lost in
deep snow upon the heights of Kermân, only two men escaping to
tell the tale. There were also very serious reverses in Turkestan. But
Arabia continued to cast forth its swarms of fighting tribes in such
vast numbers, and the wild fanaticism of the faith still rolled so
rapidly onward, that these and similar disasters soon disappeared in
the swelling tide of conquest.
Excepting raids of little import, Syria
had for some time past enjoyed rest,[442] Syria, Asia Minor, and
Armenia. a.h. XXV. a.d. 646.
when suddenly in the second year of this
Caliphate, Muâvia was startled by the approach of an army from
Asia Minor, which he had not the means to oppose. Othmân ordered
troops to pass over from the eastern provinces, and eight thousand
volunteers soon joined the Syrian army. Thus reinforced, the Arabs
repulsed the Byzantine attack. Following up their success, they
overran Asia Minor, and, piercing the heart of Armenia, joined their
comrades on the Persian border within sight of the Caspian. Thence
they penetrated as far north as Tiflis, and even to the shores of the
Black Sea. Thereafter hostilities were renewed for a long period
every summer; and eventually, aided by naval expeditions from the
ports of Africa, the Syrian generals pushed forward their conquests
in the Levant and Asia Minor, enlarged their coasts, and
strengthened their border.
In Africa, I have already noticed the
desperate attack made early in the reign of Africa. a.h. XXV. a.d. 646.
Othmân on Alexandria from seaward. The
Byzantine forces, for a little while, regained possession of the city,
but (as we have before related) were finally driven out by Amru; and
against the Moslem power in Egypt no further attack was made. The
Imperial arms, however, were still active in Africa; and along the
northern shores of the Mediterranean, strong Arab columns were
long actively engaged. Among the chiefs who had joined the
Egyptian army was Abu Sarh,[443] already noticed as the foster-
brother of Othmân. He did not bear an enviable reputation in Islam;