Differences Between Jefferson And Transcendentalists

Many people nowadays take their right to question the government for granted. Puritans believed that government was something to dogmatically follow, and never question. The trials that occurred in Salem show this fact as clearly as crystal. Deists, like the founding fathers of the United States, held the belief that the people had a right to question the government. After all, they were the ones to shake Great Britain’s authority on the colonies. And lastly, transcendentalists were not only of the opinion that the people had a right to question their government, they also encouraged it. The canonical literature created by some of the celebrated writers in the United States shows a change in regards to the government’s attitude toward questioning.

With this in mind, Thomas Jefferson, in The Autobiography: The Declaration of Independence, stated that “all men [...] are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights” (141). While it is not mentioned in this broad statement, Jefferson most likely did mean the right to question the government’s actions. The rights mentioned by Jefferson are the rights all men are born with, rights that cannot be taken away by any outside force. Deists believed that these rights entitled people to be allowed to question their government, in contrast to the puritans who believed such questioning was a threat. When writing to John Adams, Abigail Adams stated that women “[would] not hold [themselves] bound by any laws in which [they] have no voice or representation”. She was confident enough to write this to him, which shows that she was not afraid of any consequences or that there would be no consequences. Adams and other women did not want to be under a government that they had no say in and were not considered a part of. While she did not publicly question the government, she was still questioning it and received no punishment as she surely would have if she were ruled by a puritan government. As shown above, the deist opinion of questioning the government was a reaction to the puritan opinion: they had become much more accepting of it and protected it as a

Because of this encouragement to challenge the government, Henry David Thoreau vehemently opposed the Mexican war, as evident from his essay, “Resistance to Civil Government”. He described the war as “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool” (Thoreau 269). By this, Thoreau meant that all the might of the government was being used by a few people to realize their goals. He saw the Mexican war as immoral and, therefore, questioned the government’s involvement in the war. Transcendentalists like him built off of the deist belief that the people have a right to question the government. In addition, he also states that “[if injustice] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, [he says], break the law” (Thoreau). He had broken the law and was thrown in jail because he refused to pay a tax, a tax he believed would support the Mexican war. Thoreau is saying that one should violate the government’s demands if those demands are to harm another person in some way. This directly aligns with the transcendentalist belief that the government’s power can and should be questioned when the government’s actions are immoral. Like deists, transcendentalists believe that the people have a right to question the