In the Course of Human Events: Jefferson, Text, and the Potentialities of Law

Closely examining the often-ignored material projects of Thomas Jefferson, I argue that these various, virtuosic, sometimes conflicted textual practices crystallized an experience of civic consciousness characterized by "fractured" constitutional time. Grounded as he was in the self-consciously assembled, fragile jurisprudence of colonial Virginia, a jurisprudence perched high in a precarious balance between provincial distinctiveness and the larger framework of the British Empire in the Atlantic world, Jefferson was in a unique position to appreciate the trauma of fragmentation that occurred in customary legal authority at the moment of the imperial crisis and the outbreak of revolutionary politics. To an extraordinarily eccentric degree, Jefferson was self-consciously aware of the instability inherent in authoritative representations of the past and the ways in which such uncertainty mattered to law and politics. He configured legal and constitutional texts as assemblages of other texts and histories. Republican institutions, from this perspective, were home to constitutional politics understood as critically engaged and historically aware projects of unsettling without abandoning the past and its representation in authoritative texts and images. Republican education, in turn, prepared citizens to exercise historically informed judgment in the area of law and politics, and amounted in Jefferson's vision to the spreading of the restricted and playful space of his own education, a democratization of an aristocratic mode of reading.;As constituting acts, Jefferson's textual practices circumscribed as well as opened up historically situated subjectivities. Jefferson worked within an inherited language of historical natural jurisprudence, but his own vision was never static. Instead he shifted from articulating a radical aesthetics of the blurring of the boundaries between nature and history to reconfiguring the contingency of the present as naturally ordered. The project of an "empire of liberty," with its programs of legal codification, national unification, of expansion over multiplicity, and of commercial political economy over jurisprudence, after all, depended on the articulation of the expansion of liberty as part of nature. Jefferson placed African Americans and Native Americans in separate regimes of historicity by circumscribing their capacities for the historically inflected speech and judgment required of republican citizens. My analysis follows the trajectory of textual practices through the representations of slaves, the collecting and interpretation of the linguistic history of Native Americans, and the legal conquest of Louisiana. The goal of the dissertation is to not only recover a lost world of dynamic material relations to the history of law, but in doing so to offer a counter-genealogy of an American discourse of denying legal and historical multiplicity, of circumscribing and doubting the capacities of peoples to make or to have been making multiple histories of their own.