Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 70, number 4, summer, 1987

              Jefferson, The West, and the Enlightenment Vision
By Merrill D. Peterson
THIS is a season of commemora¬ tion in the Old Northwest—a time for the people ofthe five states (Ohio, In¬ diana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) to take stock of their origins. Almost two and a half years ago I spoke at Marietta College, at the site of the first permanent settlement in the Old Northwest, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Virginia cession of this w-hole immense domain to the general government of the United States. I was hon¬ ored to be part of that occasion, and I am hon¬ ored to be here, in .Milwaukee, at the farther reaches ofthe Old Northwest, to inaugurate a series of annual lectures ior the Wisccjnsin Humanities Committee.
It is fitting, for w-hat I have to say, to allude to another commemoration: the 100th anni¬ versary ofthe Statue of Liberty at the entrance to the harbor of New- York. That colossal mon¬ ument, because of the time and the place, more particularlv because of the eloquent verses of Emma Lazarus that were later affixed to it, became the symbol of American immigration—"Mother of Exiles" beckoning the peoples of all lands to "the golden door." And what a symbol it is! We should not forget, however, that the monument was conceived and executed to commemorate the Declara¬ tion of American Independence, that the date inscribed on the tablet cradled in the arm of
Editors' noie: This article is based upon Professor Peterson's Wisconsin Jefferson Lecture presented by the Wisconsin Humanities Committee at the Milwaukee Pub¬ lic Library, June 24, 1986. Our special thanks to Patricia C. Anderson ofthe Wisconsin Humanities Committee for enabling us to offer it to a wider audience.
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the statue is July 4, 1776, and that it bore the official name, "Liberty Enlightening the World." The idea that the American Revolu¬ tion looked not only to liberty and self- government but the advance of enlighten¬ ment and civilization—that it was a humanistic experiment as well as a political one—lies at the very center of Thomas Jefferson's vision and is at the heart of my theme today.
The author of the Declaration of Indepen¬ dence was the first law-giver of the trans- Appalachian West and the foremost Ameri¬ can philosopher of the Enlightenment. He was born on the western fringes of settlement in Virginia in 1743. From his father, a self- taught surveyor and mapmaker, who had risen from frontier farmer to planter and first- citizen of his county, he imbibed the spirit of Virginia exploration and pioneering; and the freedom, openness, and simplicity of this early world gave the young Jefferson a sense of man's proper relationship to nature that, in maturity, colored all his values. There was something about this country, about Albe¬ marle County, that stirred the westering imag¬ ination. George Rogers Clark, conqueror of the Northwest during the American Revolu¬ tion, and Meriwether Lewis, whcj led the great expediticm to the Pacific, were native sons. (Where I come from, Charlottesville, the county seat, there are today monuments to these men and events at the opposite ends of Main Street.) Jefferson himself was neither pi¬ oneer nor explorer; he never set foot west of the Appalachians. Yet the West was in his thoughts from an early age, and among the Founding Fathers of this new- nation no (me
Copyright © 1987 by The Slate Historical Society of Wisconsin All rights of reproduction in any form reserved