July 21, 1816 – Jefferson Writes It is Absurd for Preceding Generations to Impose Laws on Current or Future Generations

On this day in history, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to William Plumer, then Governor of New Hampshire (who, notably, in 1803 proposed secession of New England from the United States because of the rising influence of Jeffersonian Democrats, inter alia). Plumer first met Jefferson in 1802 as a newly elected Federalist senator from New Hampshire. By the end of his five years in Congress, as Lynn W. Turner writes in “Thomas Jefferson Through the Eyes of a New Hampshire Politician,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Sep., 1943), pp. 205-214, Plumer had shed most of his bias against Jefferson, was about to transfer his political allegiance to Jefferson’s party, and “recorded this transformation in shrewd and faithful detail.” He came to admire Jefferson a great deal, and pursued a friendship with him, along with an ongoing correspondence.

William Plumer, via Wikipedia

On this day in history, Jefferson responded to a letter from Plumer in which he enclosed a copy of his recent speech to the New Hampshire legislature, which Jefferson “read a second time with great pleasure.” Jefferson observed:

…it is replete with sound principles, and truly republican. some articles too are worthy of peculiar notice. the idea that institutions established for the use of the nation, cannot be touched nor modified, even to make them answer their end, because of rights gratuitously supposed in those employed to manage them in trust for the public, may perhaps be a salutary provision against the abuses of a monarch, but is most absurd against the nation itself. yet our lawyers and priests generally inculcate this doctrine; and suppose that preceding generations held the earth more freely than we do; had a right to impose laws on us, unalterable by ourselves; and that we, in like manner, can make laws, and impose burthens on future generations, which they will have no right to alter: in fine that the earth belongs to the dead, & not the living . . .”

You can read the entire letter here.