Thomas Jefferson
Letters on Liberty and Power

There should be no doubt, either, that Jefferson believed that government was the greatest, if not only, threat to individual liberty. He wrote that "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.¹ This is so because those who gain positions of power tend always to extend the bounds of it. Power must always be constrained or limited else it will increase to the level that it will be despotic. Jefferson wrote to Judge Spencer Roane in 1819, "It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also ...."² With this principle of necessary limitation in mind, Jefferson declared "that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest upon inference."³

1. Edward Dumbauld, ed., The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson ( New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1955), p. 138.

2. Frank Irwin, ed., Letters of Thomas Jefferson (Tilton, N.H.: Sanbornton Bridge Press, 1975), p. 215.

3. Irwin, p. 40.

(Jefferson] wrote in a letter in 1820: "You [William C. Jarvis] seem ... to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions, a very dangerous doctrine indeed and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy . . . The constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that, to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party its members would become despots."⁴

4. Dumbauld, p. 153.

"At the establishment of our constitution," Jefferson wrote, "the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions . . . become law by precedent, sapping by little and little the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction .... In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life if secured against all liability to account. "⁵

5. Thomas Jefferson, "The Constitution-Endangered by the Federal Judiciary," Foundations of Liberty, James R. Patrick, ed., vol. 1 (1988), p. 27.