| | | The January insurrection would have been small potatoes to Jefferson.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion; what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms."
Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, 1787
Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and most of the Constitution, but he never believed the Constitution was fixed, it was always subject to change.
“We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.”
Thomas Jefferson
To Jefferson, the occasional uprising wasn't necessarily a crisis, it was a corrective. That 1787 quote to William Stephens Smith is a clear endorsement of the idea that resistance, even violent resistance, can be a healthy sign of a vigilant and liberty-minded populace. In that spirit, something like the January 6th riot, while chaotic and unlawful, would not have shocked Jefferson in principle. He might have disapproved of the causes or the execution, but not the idea that the people could rise up in fury against what they perceive as tyranny.
Jefferson also believed the Constitution was not sacred scripture. He famously wrote that laws and institutions must evolve with time, each generation has its own needs and cannot be forever chained to the past. That quote about each generation being “a distinct nation” captures it perfectly. He thought it absurd for the dead to govern the living.
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